


Its Hour Come Round At Last

by Graywand



Series: Agents Pines series [1]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: F/M, Gen, Mystery, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-23
Updated: 2015-06-29
Packaged: 2018-03-19 06:53:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 42,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3600447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Graywand/pseuds/Graywand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been four years since the epic summer in Gravity Falls, and things have changed for the Pines twins. Pacifica is now living in California and unofficially engaged to Dipper. Mabel's friends have joined them as well, and things seem to be pretty normal. All is not well, however. A new culinary movement is in town, one that rubs Dipper the wrong way. He's right to be concerned. Dipifica</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Darkness Find Me

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: On mature consideration, I realized that my initial draft... wasn't ready for release. And I should explain that I have my OC as written as having a romantic connection to Dipper because I wanted the victim, the OC's sister, to be more than just a walk-on character, and to add extra urgency to the investigation, and for some reason I didn't think friendship was enough. But friendship is enough and I actually like this better.
> 
> Again, implied sex in this chapter.

"God, give us Peace! not such as lulls to sleep,  
But sword on thigh and brow with purpose knit!."

-James Russell Lowell,  _The Washers of the Shroud_

 

_The ammonia stink of urine and the reek of feces filled Pacifica Northwest's bedroom. She had been locked in her room for hours. The eleven-year-old blonde girl lay in her bed, tears running down her face from the pain. The burning along her legs from urine and feces that she'd been unable to adequately clean up, and the pain of being locked up in her room for what felt like days, though she knew it could only have been one day. And all for simply tracking mud on their carpet._

_She lay there on her bed, tears streaming down her face._ Why did they have to feed me?  _She thought to herself, disgusted with everything, including her parents. And herself._ If they hadn't fed me I wouldn't have had to go to the bathroom in the corner? _Even at her age, she understood the sick rational behind it. They'd given her a bedroom with no adjoining bathroom unlike every other bedroom in the house. They gave it to her, so if they felt they had too, she'd be forced to stay in the room amongst her own waste._

_"_ Pacifica _?" A deep masculine voice said, reverberating through her little world. She shot up in shock. That voice sounded so familiar._

"Pacifica!"  _She hissed in shock as the world in her mind's eye fell away._

And she was back in the present. Sitting up on her boyfriend's bed she mentally took stock of her situation. She was not in Gravity Falls, Oregon, she was in Piedmont, Caliornia. She was sixteen, not eleven, and she hadn't been in that situation in five years, and hadn't even seen her mother or father in two years. Not since the latter's trial and conviction on charges of treason. She'd been in the guardianship of Dipper's Aunt Shannon for the past four years. That dark chapter in her life was over. Or so she kept telling herself.

_So why do I keep having these flashbacks?_  She thought to herself glumly.  _Maybe Dipper and Shannon are right. I_ do  _need to see a therapist._

"Pacifica!" Dipper shouted again. She looked up at him. Dipper was sitting at his desktop computer, but he was turned in his chair towards her and he had a look of mingled irritation and worry on his face.

"Sorry, Dipper I kind of blanked out for a minute there."

"'Blanked out?'" Dipper said, with the tone of someone who wouldn't believe her if she said rain was wet. "Pacifica you were having a flashback."

"I was not," she said defensively, her cheeks coloring. "I was daydreaming."

"No, you weren't Paz," he said softly. "I know what you daydreaming looks like, you get this glazed over look on your face. Not you're flashbacks. You're either scared. Or crying. You were crying, love."

It was only then that she really registered the fact that her face was lined with tears. "Um, well,"

Dipper got up from his seat and sat next to her on the bed. He was a head taller than she was, a full six feet tall , and as he wrapped her arms around him, he asked. "Was it the room again?"

She nodded against his chest.

"That bastard," Dipper growled as he held her. "I'm glad he's finally getting what he deserves."

Preston Northwest, on death row for treason since he was convicted for his role in the events of his final days of her and Dipper's time in Gravity Falls, had exhausted his last appeal before the Ninth Circuit and the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, where Preston (she absolutely refused to call him her father, and she was only keeping the Northwest name until she and Dipper turned eighteen and very quietly tied the knot) had been held at USP Atwater, had authorized him to be executed by lethal injection on the first of next month.

She didn't know whether she wanted to be there. Dipper was going. Dipper, who had always been more eager to get revenge then his sister,  _wanted_ to see the man who'd put the woman he loved through hell, had conditioned her to respond to a bell like a dog, who had conspired to bring what Preston had termed "the reign of mankind over it's own affairs to an end" finally get what he felt he deserved.

Pacifica wasn't sure what she wanted. Part of her hated him as much as Dipper did, if not more, and  _all_  of her agreed that he deserved to die for his crimes. She…just wasn't sure she could take satisfaction from it.

"I'm sorry, love," he said softly into her ear. "I'm sorry I didn't act sooner. I should have gotten you out of that house that night."

"You couldn't have known," she responded. She didn't know how many times she'd heard him say that over the years. She didn't like him beating himself up over it, but she understood. Dipper loved her; it was as simple as that. And she'd go anywhere with him, do anything with him. Because she loved him. And despite his self-flagellating behavior over it at times, he  _had_ saved her from that hell.

"All the signs were there," he grunted back against her hair.

"You were  _twelve,_ Dipper."

"Did you not notice all the stuff we accomplished during that summer? Hell, I fought in epic gladiatorial combat in the grim darkness of the far future just to give a friend of mine a chance to see his deadbeat of a father. I could have found some way to get you away from him sooner."

Pacifica looked up at him leaned up against his lips. "You  _did_ save me you know?" She said after she had pulled away. "You  _did_." She kissed him again, harder, nibbling on his bottom lip.

Dipper moaned against her lips and Pacifica pushed him down onto the bed, going for the buttons of his shirt and kissing down his neck when they heard the telltale sound of a car pulling up into the driveway. She broke the kiss with a disappointed huff.

"Damn it," her fiancé growled even as she rolled off him. Dipper hastily buttoned his shirt back up and ran down the stairs.

Dipper Pines hit the bottom of the stairs to see his mother, Jennifer Pines, bounding through the double doors of the living room, a wide smile on her face.

"I got in!" The five foot ten woman in her early forties with brown hair said excitedly as she closed the door behind her, and she closed the distance between them and swept her six foot tall son into her arms for a maternal bear hug. "Oh, my God I'm so excited I got in!"

Dipper hugged his Mom back, he had no idea precisely what it was she was talking about, but whatever it was made her very happy.

"Mom," he said quickly. "What is it? What did you get into?"

She reached into her purse and shoved a brochure into his hand. "Pacifica!" she called causing him to look up at her in shock, his face heating. "Come down here, you should hear this too. I know you're in my son's room! I'm not mad or anything."

Finally registering the mortified look on her son's face, she smirked. "What," she said, looking up at him as if this was the most natural thing in the world. "You think I didn't sneak into your father's house when I was your age in order to-,"

"Eeew, Mom, too much information!"

Pacifica walked down the stairs, her face a beet red. "Hello, Misses Pines," she said with admirable calm given the circumstances, but there was still a quiver in her voice. "What's up?"

"I got the Ox and Lamb into the Epicurean Club movement!" She half-shouted with excitement, as she hugged Pacifica herself before looking her straight in the eye, which was easy because Pacifica and Dipper's mother were the same height . "Can you believe it?! I'll be meeting with some of the best chefs in the industry!" She turned to Dipper, "I can't wait to tell your Dad when he gets home," she said as she bounded up the stairs to the master bedroom to change out of her clothes.

"Well," Pacifica said after a moment, following her future mother-in-law with her eyes. "She seems excited."

"She should be," Dipper said, as he took Pacifica's hand and the two of them walked to the dull red loveseat in the living room and sat down. "The Epicurean Club has only been around for a few months, but it's already quite a feather in the cap of a Bay Area restaurant."

The movement had started in January, he recalled, when the ornate, gold filigree stickers began appearing in restaurant windows throughout the Bay Area, after said restaurant had paid through the nose to get it. Once a month, on a staggered schedule, the club's members met in each restaurant order to partake of a lavish dinner service that contained exotic foods rarely seen in the West. His curiosity piqued, he opened up the dark green brochure and began to read, motioning Pacifica over to look at it with him. He wrapped an arm lovingly around her shoulder and she snuggled against him as the two began to read.

_Congratulations,_  it said in ornate white lettering, _you're now a restaurant member of the Epicurean Club, the movement that seeks to forever remake the culinary landscape of the Bay Area. Our founder, Thomas Salvatore, and his panel of top chefs, have prepared an exclusive menu for our members._

_When your restaurant comes up in the schedule, you will close down for general service and hold an exclusive one for our members, where you and your members will dine on._

_Exquisite Beluga caviar_

Fugu _, the famous Pufferfish dish of Japan_

Pacha _, the exotic beef dish of the East_

_Sardinian cheese_ Casu Marzu _, with it's taste of gorgonzola and black pepper_

_And finally, the highlight of our evening, the exquisite Pate de Foie Gras on crackers, that has made our members gush with delight._

_Welcome, to the greatest revolution in the world of taste in a hundred years. A decision you will not regret._

Something about the tone of the paper sparked memories of Gideon. It seemed…too gushing, too celebratory, as though they had something to hide.

_Our Founder: Thomas Salvatore has been seeking to push the boundaries of taste since he was nine. A simple oyster with a spritz of lemon has sent him into the world of culinary delight. Graduating at the top of his class at the Culinary Institute of America, he has sought to remake American cuisine ever since. A path that has led him to his greatest creation, the Epicurean Club._

"Call me paranoid," Dipper said slowly, a sinking feeling in his gut, "but there's something…off about this whole thing."

"You're paranoid," she said immediately, still looking at the brochure. "I don't see anything wrong here. I see a bunch of foodies gathering to partake in exotic foods. Sure it may seem ostentatious to some people, but nothing to set off warning alarms. Or worth launching a full-scale investigation."

Dipper sighed, leaning back and continuing to look at the brochure in his hands. "I don't know, it seems to be establishing itself…too fast. This only started back in January. It's May. What's more, who is this Thomas Salvatore? They act like he's one of the world's top chefs and yet I've never heard his name mentioned anywhere until just now, in this brochure. There's something off about this, Pacifica, and I want to find out what it is." He looked at Pacifica expectantly. Four years ago, Pacifica, minus the moments of soul-deep terror and gibbering madness, had on some level enjoyed fighting alongside him to stop her father, Gideon, and Bill Cipher, if it was only the sense that she was doing something worth doing. Would she follow him again, with only his suspicions? With no mysterious journal to guide them this time? Pacifica had told him point blank that she'd follow him anywhere, but he wasn't about to drag her into what could very well turn out to be a wild goose chase, if she didn't want to.

_"'He's normal,'"_ he remembered Mabel saying all those years ago right before that…bizarre incident with the aliens in the human suit _, "'and Dipper's just crazy.'"_ He couldn't always be right. Could he?

Pacifica sat there for a moment as he looked at her expectantly, then nodded. "Well," she said, without a trace of irritation. "I  _have_ been wondering how to spend our summer. We can't just spend all our time in bed with each other or traipsing around the boardwalk." She kissed him on the cheek. "Besides, we told each other all those years ago that we would 'stand before each other in life and at each other's back in battle.' We've held true to that, ever since. What kind of fiancee would I be if I stayed out of this one, especially if you're right?"

"And if I'm wrong?"

"If you're wrong, you're wrong," Pacifica said, kissing him softly on the lips. "But no matter what happens, you'll still be my Dipper, and I'm still going to marry you, dork."

* * *

"Four years," a moderately accented voice that still bore much of the cadences of the South Korean city of Incheon said. "Four years, and I never get tired of this sight."

Mabel Pines had been absorbed petting this black and white cat that had come up to her and started rubbing herself against her leg while she, Candy, and Grenda were out for a walk on the East 18th Street Pier when her friend's words cut through her reverie. She looked up to see Candy, five foot four, with long silky black hair, staring out at the view out over Lake Merritt. She could stare at the view of Lakeland District, Downtown Oakland, and the Tribune Tower glittering in the water for the longest time.

Mabel enjoyed the sight across Lake Merritt too. Indeed, she'd drawn it more than once since that life-changing summer in Gravity Falls. Having deemed the area too dangerous now that the truth of the paranormal nature of the city had come out, Candy and Grenda's parents had perhaps overreacted in insisting that they leave Gravity Falls at once, rather than stay and participate in the rebuilding. Nothing either of them could do could change her parents mind, but they had somehow managed to convince them to move to Oakland so they could be near Mabel.

"It is quite beautiful at night," Mabel said. "And on the plus side, there's no giant monster island head waiting to try to eat us out there."

"That has to be the single scariest video I've ever seen in my life," Grenda's deep, masculine voice said from somewhere to their left. "Do you know what it is that thing was saying?"

"Yeah," Mabel said shuddering. "It was saying 'You have awoken me from my slumber! Enter my mouth, children. Enter your destiny.'"

"At least we don't have to put up with that anymore," Candy said airily. "Around here, things are pretty much normal. All we have to do is worry about cute guys, and getting through our schoolwork in one piece."

Mabel smirked. "Yeah. My brother and his girlfriend seems kind of bummed out, though. As much as events up in Oregon scared him, they liked having a purpose."  _And so did I._ It was something she never admitted to anyone else. That as much as she was focused on having an "awesome summer romance," that, even if to a lesser extent than Dipper, Wendy, and Pacifica, fighting the good fight was still one of the most rewarding things she'd ever done.

A sharp scream of fear tore through the night. Terror running in rivulets down her back, she wheeled about to see a short girl of about four foot ten, she couldn't have been more than twelve, surrounded by four huge men in black ski masks. They had her by her arms and legs and were dragging her towards an unmarked black SUV. Their eyes met, and in a horrified moment, Mabel recognized her instantly as the sister of one of Dipper's friends from Band. Of course, what happened next would have happened even if she didn't know him from Adam.

Mabel's mind blanked as her fight or flight instincts flooded her body and mind with adrenaline, memories of Gideon tearing her away from her brother's grasp flashing through her mind. The universe seemed to slow as she launched herself forward, her hand going for the collapsible self-defense baton her mother insisted she carry everywhere with her these days.

It clicked out to a one foot long stainless steel blue rod that she swung over her head as she launched herself at one of the masked thugs picking up their prospective victim by her feet. The girl struggled, kicking forward with her feet, even as an enraged Mabel slammed her baton into his back.

He gave a roar of pain, dropping the girl's feet and turning about to face Mabel and launching a huge, meaty fist at her face. Mabel dodged it deftly, twisting to the side; her feet dancing on the pavement even as her baton slammed into his ribs so hard that she felt the vibration halfway up her arm. He curled up around his ribs, and she turned to see that Candy and Grenda had closed with and engaged the two kidnappers holding her by her arms. Candy had run at him at full speed and barreled into his stomach, knocking him down and kicking, punching, and biting any part of him she could reach. However Candy was smaller and slighter than her opponent and she was having a difficult time keeping him on the ground. Grenda on the other hand, was a full six foot tall, muscular, and stronger than most men, seemed to be matching her opponent blow for blow.

The girl they were trying to save, a short, brown-skinned girl with black hair, and epicanthic folds on her eyes made to run but the other kidnapper moved to follow her. Mabel saw it, and attempted to shift her position to come between the girl and her kidnapper, only to feel what felt like a hand wrap itself around her ankle and pull.  _That bastard I knocked down must have tripped me,_  she thought blankly even as her hands flew out in an instinctive attempt to keep her from hitting the pavement full on.

The shock of the impact slammed into her hand, the rough pavement ripping open the skin of her palms. Ignoring the blood pouring out of her hands, she flipped over on her back to see that the other thug had managed to close with the girl. Two strong hands wrapped around her waist and flung her bodily up onto her shoulder. The girl's screams pierced the night and Mabel's bloody hand wrapped around her baton as she struggled to her feet. She had managed to right herself when a force like a rock slammed into her backside as the other thug tackled her from behind, sending them both careening back onto the ground, knocking the wind out of her diaphragm.

"We've got her!" A loud voice shouted over the din in front of her. "Everyone get up and let's go! Go!"

She felt the weight removed from her back and chest, and she rolled back over, taking in a huge lungful of air, and feeling for sensation below her waist. She could still walk, still had sensation below her waist, and she sat up, to see that the other thugs had managed to throw Candy and Grenda off of them and pile back into the unmarked black Ford Expedition. The screams of their captive inside the SUV were drowned out by the loud screech of rubber tires on pavement as the car backed out at full speed and swung around in a wide arc, narrowly missing hitting Candy and Grenda as it barreled forward into the night.

In the distance, the wail of police sirens began.

* * *

Dipper sighed passionately as he kissed up and down Pacifica's neck. His parents had gone out on a celebratory dinner engagement ("cooked by someone else for a change," the tired owner and head chef of the Ox and Lamb had said as she and her husband went out the door). Pacifica had promptly sneaked back in, went back to his bedroom, and they'd promptly resumed their previous attempt to score.

"Mmm," the very naked girl said under him, voice low and throaty. "Dipper."

He was smirking with masculine pride and kissing back up her neck as the three toned loud screech of the Emergency Alert System cut through the air in the room. He rolled off of her to see that the screen had cut from the news to the Emergency Alert System.

_EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM_

_Civil Authorities_

_Issued a_

_Child Abduction Emergency_

_The following message is being transmitted from the California Highway Patrol and the Oakland Police Department. This is an AMBER Alert. At 7:31 PM Pacific Standard Time, a twelve year old girl was abducted on the East 18_ _th_ _Street Pier in Oakland, California. The girl is believed to be Jessica Ocampo. She is four foot ten inches tall, weighs ninety-seven pounds and has dark brown eyes and black hair. She was last seen wearing an green T-shirt, blue jeans, and flip flops. The identities of the abductors are currently unknown, but were wearing dark clothing, and ski masks and were driving a black unmarked 2011 Ford Expedition possibly headed for Interstate 80. Three teenage girls were in the area at the time and attempted to intervene to prevent the kidnapping but were unsuccessful. None of the girls who intervened were abducted. If you see the abductors, abducted, or the vehicle they were driving in call 911. Do not attempt to approach the abductors, as they are believed to have the potential to kill. Again, call 911. Your call will be reported to the nearest police department who will handle the situation. This is an AMBER Alert transmitted from the California Highway Patrol and the Oakland Police Department. Please stay tuned to your local media outlets for more details on this situation._

_Jessica Ocampo,_  Dipper thought, a warning spark flaring into his brain.  _They can't mean_ Melanie's  _sister, can they?_ Melanie Ocampo was, along with him, was in Band, and a drummer to Dipper's sousaphone player. She'd also been in Band with him in junior high, and had become a close friend of both him and Pacifica since their return from Gravity Falls. He also knew her sister, a bright, intelligent, cheerful girl full of energy, with a somewhat awkward precocious crush on him.

_Melanie's going to be a wreck_ , he thought to himself, fear and sympathy flooding him.

"You don't think that's  _our_  Jessica Ocampo, do you?" Pacifica said, her voice quivering with the same emotions he felt.

"It's a common enough Filipino surname," he replied glumly, "but I get the bad feeling that it is."

Abruptly his cellphone went off, the sound of it vibrating against the nightdesk sounding like a jackhammer. He hastily grabbed it to see Mabel's photo on the caller ID.

_Three teenage girls_ , he thought to himself, a growing trepidation filling him. He answered the phone . "Mabel," he said resignedly, "tell me you're not in all this."

" _Oh, I'm in it bro bro,_ " Mabel said, more than a trace of anger on her voice. " _Candy's holding the phone to my face because a paramedic is bandaging my hands right now, and there's a bajillion cops on this street._ "

"What happened?"

" _We were admiring the view at Lake Merritt when we heard screaming behind us,_ " Mabel said, her voice in quivering in anger and pain. " _We turned to see Melanie's sister being dragged into a SUV. We tried to fight them off, but they overpowered us._ " Her voice broke and he knew his sister was fighting back tears. " _And they got her anyway._ "

"Hey, Mabel," Dipper said soothingly. "You tried, that's the most important thing."

" _I don't think_   _'I tried'_   _is going to be much comfort to her family at the moment,_ " Mabel snapped. " _Sorry Dipper,_ " she said contritely a moment later.

"It's okay. Hey listen Pacifica and I are getting ready, we'll meet you at the hospital."

" _Good,_ " she said, " _so will Mom and Dad._ "

* * *

"Hey, Mabel," Dipper said, half an hour later as he and Pacifica stepped into her room at Oakland's Kaiser Permanente Medical Center. "How are you feeling?"

"Could be better," Mabel said tiredly. "They'll be coming in here in a few minutes to stitch my hands up, and they'll want to keep me overnight for observation." She grimaced, and Dipper knew that she was in more emotional pain then physical. Mabel loved kids, and her failure to save one from being kidnapped had to hurt worse than any injuries she may have received.

"I want to find Jessica," Mabel said after a moment, a hard tone on her voice. "I want to find her, and I want to bring her home. Will you help me?"

"Mabel," Pacifica said cautiously. "This isn't Gravity Falls. We're not dealing with something so far beyond ordinary experience that there's literally no one else more qualified to do this."

Mabel's eyes, glistening with tears, blazed as she glared at her. "I don't care, Pacifica! Jessica Ocampo looked to  _me_ to save her, I'm not letting her down!"

Dipper reached forward and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her into comforting hug, even as Pacifica walked over and patted her on the back. "I'll help you, Mabel," he said softly. "I promise. One way or another, we'll find her."

"So," Pacifica said from behind Mabel, "I take it we're no longer going to be investigating the Epicurean Club?"

"Oh," Dipper said, unwrapping himself from around his sister. "We'll be investigating the Epicurean Club. Something tells me that this kidnapping isn't unrelated."

"Wait," Mabel said, confused. "Why would we investigate that restaurant movement that Mom was so excited about when she called me earlier?"

"Dipper has this theory that there's some nefarious side to the whole thing," Pacifica responded. "I don't quite understand how this kidnapping could be connected. What are they going to be doing? Eating kids?"

Silence descended on the room as the exact same thought simultaneously occurred to all three of them.

"Oh, come on," Pacifica said nervously, the realization that she may have hit on something written all over her face. "No one can be  _that_ depraved. Can they?"


	2. Pilgrims on the Path of Shadows

"Again the shadow moveth o'er

The dial-plate of time."

-John Greenleaf Whittier,  _The New Year_

 

Dipper closed the door to Mabel's hospital room and crossed back over to her, sitting in the chair next to her. "Okay. So we're all in agreement - the Epicurean Club needs to be investigated." Both women in the room nodded glumly, neither one of them bringing up the prospect that had just occurred to them. It was simply too horrible to contemplate, but that didn't make anything behind it necessarily untrue. The only way they could prove or disprove that horrible gut feeling was to start digging. "All right," Dipper said aloud. "The question now is, who else do we bring in on this? Should it be just the five of us, if we count Candy and Grenda? Or should we bring in others."

"There's at least one other person we should bring in on this," Mabel said immediately. "Melanie. Her sister was the one kidnapped."

Dipper grimaced. "Yeah," he said slowly, not wanting to broach this about one of his friends. "I've always gotten the sense that Melanie never quite believed our stories about Gravity Falls. Oh, she believed wholeheartedly that Pacifica was abused and that something serious did go down, the brutal, bloody time that had capped off their time in Gravity Falls had been national news, after all. However, I always got the sense that she didn't quite believe the more supernatural stuff. She's…very scientific. It's hard for her to accept something without physical evidence and we've both been on the receiving end of her 'eyewitness evidence is the worst possible scientific evidence' speech more than once."

"True but-"

They were interrupted by a loud rapping on the hospital door. Figuring it was probably a doctor or nurse here to stitch up Mabel's hands, Dipper got up and opened the door. When he did so, he saw instead a young woman about his age, who around five feet tall, with long black hair and dark eyes, crying in the doorway. She was wearing blue jeans and a blue T-shirt and looked for all the world like she wanted to stab someone, anyone. He couldn't blame her.

Dipper sighed glumly. "Hey, Melanie."

"Hey, Dipper," she said softly with a wan smile on her face. "How's Mabel?"

"I'm doing okay," Mabel said from behind her. "I'll need stitches on my hands, but other than that I'll be fine. How are you holding up?"

"I'm holding. I don't know how, but I am," she said in a hoarse and exhausted tone. "Thank you, Mabel, from me and my family. We know you did your best, and tell your friends thanks."

"I will," Mabel responded, bowing her head.

"If there's anything you or your parents need, Melanie," Dipper said softly. "Anything at all. You let us know."

"Thank you, Dipper," she said softly. After an awkward moment, she said, "Well, I should probably leave before the doctors get back. Excuse me."

"Wait, Melanie," Mabel said as Melanie turned to leave. "Paz, get the door again."

Pacifica looked at Dipper for a moment. Dipper, knowing that there was no stopping Mabel once she was set on something, nodded.

As soon as the door slammed shut, and as soon as Pacifica crossed back over to them, Mabel started in. "Dipper has a theory about all this."

"I don't want to call it a theory at this point," Dipper said reluctantly, both out of being unsure how Melanie would react and not liking the thought itself. "But…"

"Dipper," Melanie said very softly when he was finished. "I know you can get paranoid at times, but surely even you can see how utterly insane this sounds. Even if someone was kidnapping and eating kids in whole or in part, surely someone on the inside of this 'Epicurean Club' would have noticed."

"If you've seen the shit we've seen-" Dipper said, his temper flaring.

"Don't get me started on that Gravity Falls cra-"

" _Damn_  it, Melanie! It happened!" Pacifica suddenly snapped from behind her, eyes blazing and hands balling into fists. For a second, he thought she was going to punch her. "We fought demons, and monsters and pervy gnomes and a psychotic nine year old with delusions of ultimate power! Dipper's great-uncle had a portal to other dimension that could destroy the universe and that's not even the half of it!"

Silence descended on the room again after Pacifica's outburst.

"You believe," Melanie said after a moment, genuine shock and surprise on her voice. She swept around, looking around at each of them in turn. "All of you do."

"Because it's what happened," Dipper said immediately. "And that's why I'm at least willing to investigate these suspicions about the Epicurean Club, instead of dismissing them. Hell, her 'father,' and I use the term loosely, brought their butler into their panic room with the express purpose of eating him if their supplies ran out. This, as horrible as it sounds, doesn't sound so farfetched after that."

Melanie stared at him for a moment longer, part of her still fighting to dismiss what he was saying. Then her face fell. "I believe you," she said a moment later.

"What was that?" Dipper and Pacifica said at the same time.

"Or I believe that you believe," she amended quickly. She gave him a look that suggested that despite what she just said, she did believe him, and the thought terrified her. "Maybe that's enough." Melanie sighed and nodded. "I'll see you guys tomorrow. I want to hear more about this." With that, she opened the door to the room and left without another word.

"Six?" Pacifica asked, as if hardly believing the exchange that had just taken place.

"Six," Dipper and Mabel said at once.

* * *

Later that night, Dipper stared at the bulletin board in his room, covered by a plain white sheet. It had been sitting there, untouched since the Fall of 2012. He hadn't expected to need it anymore, and for the past four years he hadn't. There simply hadn't been a mystery big enough or complex enough to justify using it again, so he'd kept it the way it was when he'd last used it, as a record of those events.

Now, though. It was needed again. He pulled the sheet off, letting it fall to the desk below it to reveal the vast complex of pictures and news articles, all connected by red thread that showed the tableau of mystery that had been Gravity Falls, Oregon. Wanting to keep some record of it, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his cellphone. He snapped a few pictures then, one by one, he pulled off every picture, every strand of red thread.

 _Red_ , he thought to himself, glumly.  _The color of blood_. He swallowed the lump that suddenly appeared in his throat.  _The blood of children?_  He remembered what it was like, in Gravity Falls. He remembered the fabricated histories, the coverups of coverups, one great-uncle pretending to be the other great-uncle. He remembered the sheer horror of seeing that newspaper clipping in Stan's office, and the realization that he'd lied to them about his purpose that entire summer.

He remembered the sleepless nights. The nights spent staring up at the ceiling, wondering when Bill Cipher was going to show up again. Wondering  _when_ , not if, Gideon was going to come for his sister and have revenge on the rest of his family. It had scared the hell out of him. It still did even four years later. Even if it had all been worth it, even if it had secured the survival of mankind. At least for now.

And here he was, going down that rabbit hole again.

He opened the drawer under the bulletin board to see the Third Journal - the journal that had dominated his life that entire summer. He was sure that the information contained therein applied to more than just Gravity Falls. But in the past few years, he hadn't seen anything that could absolutely be corroborated as the supernatural. Oh, sure there were a few odd things. Sure, he'd occasionally felt cold shudders that might have been ghosts passing through. He'd seen odd things out of the corner of his eye. But it was nothing concrete, nothing solid he could go on. And he'd always had something else to do anyway. Be it homework, or, in the last year or so, Pacifica.

He couldn't stop the ghost of a smile that appeared on his face at that last part.

But now this had to happen. Sure, he missed fighting the good fight, but there was also the downside. The fear, the worry, the sleepless nights that often had him chewing on his own shirt.

 _I don't have a choice_ , Dipper thought to himself as he pulled off the last pieces of string.  _I didn't when I was twelve, and I sure as hell don't have a choice now._

With the board now clear of the accumulated evidence of the previous mystery, he picked up one of the pushpins before he grabbed the Epicurean Club brochure out of his pocket and stuck it on there. Then he grabbed his printout of the photo FBI-San Francisco had released of Jessica Ocampo as part of the AMBER Alert and stuck it on the board. He only had the barest conjecture to go on at this point so he didn't connect them with a piece of string.

He only prayed he never had too.

His heart skipped a beat as he heard a rapping on his window. He turned to see Pacifica crouching on the landing of his somewhat out –of-place fire escape. Breathing a sigh of relief, he crossed over to the window and opened it up, holding his hand out to help her in.

"Couldn't sleep?"

Pacifica shook her head. "A twelve-year-old girl could end up on someone's dinner plate soon, of course I can't sleep!" She looked up to see Dipper's bulletin board, shorn of its previous information relating to Gravity Falls. "I see you've reset the board."

"I felt like we had too. We don't know how deep this is going to get. And I wanted to get it ready."

"I would have suggested it, if you hadn't already done it, to be honest."

Pacifica walked over to his closet, grabbing the nightgown and extra pair of underwear she kept stashed in Dipper's room and began changing into her pajamas.

Briefly, Dipper considered stopping her at mid-undress and dragging her back to the bed. Briefly. Given everything that happened in the last few hours, he was in no mood at the moment.

As he moved to get dressed for bed himself, his cellphone rang. He picked it up off his desk, and his eyes widened to see Wendy's photo on it.

Pressing the screen of the phone, he put his phone next to his ear. "Hey, Wendy," he said as lightly as he could under the circumstances

" _Dipper_ ," Wendy's voice rough. " _I heard about what happened. How's Mabel? Is she okay?_ "

"She's fine, Wendy," Dipper said reassuringly. "She'll need stitches, and they want to keep her overnight, but the Doctor's say she should be out of there by tomorrow evening at the latest."

He heard Wendy's sigh of relief. " _Thank God. So she should be out of the hospital by the time we get there?_ "

Shit. He forgot. Wendy and her friends had gotten into CSU San Francisco and they were coming down over the summer to familiarize themselves with the area.

"Oh, and uh, listen. You know how you always relished accompanying us on our missions?"

" _Yeah_ ," Wendy said, quizzically. " _What are you saying, you've discovered another mystery?_ "

He looked up at the bulletin board behind him, with it's new and frankly disturbing evidence. "You could say that."

" _Sweet!_ " Wendy said, excitement on her voice. " _Summer has been really boring without you around here_."

"Don't get too excited," Dipper said immediately, that horrible sinking feeling returning. "You're not going to like the implications of this one any more than I do."

" _I didn't find much of what happened four years ago warm and fluffy either,"_ Wendy said pointedly _. "Still, it was…the good fight. We saved mankind, Dipper, and at least it wasn't boring." He heard a deep yawn on the other end of the line. "Anyway. We're due to be in town by tomorrow afternoon. Night, Dipper._ "

"Night." And Dipper hung up.

He turned around to see Pacifica pulling back the covers and climbing into bed. "Seven?"

"Seven. Probably twelve, if you factor in Robbie and the others." He climbed into bed and kissed her goodnight, before turning off the lamp next to his bed and closing his eyes. His eyes flew open a moment later, when a thought occurred to him, something he'd seen on an old TV movie once. One he watched with Pacifica only a few days ago.

"Why do you come here, Pacifica?"

Pacifica stirred against him. "What?" she asked quizzically.

"Why do you come here, Pacifica?" he repeated sternly.

"What kind of a question is-" she began hotly before stopping herself when she realized what she was quoting. "Oh," she said softly. "I come to serve."

"Who do you serve?"

"I serve the truth."

"What is the truth?"

"We are one people, one voice."

"Will you follow me into fire? Will you follow me into darkness? Will you follow me into death?"

"I will," Pacifica responded without a trace of hesitation.

"Then follow," Dipper said softly, snuggling himself against her. Within a few moments, they were both asleep.

* * *

_Fifteen hours later._

A very full Wendy Corduroy leaned back in her chair at the Pines' dining room table, trying to think through the rapidly oncoming food coma. She wanted to slump down in her chair, but Dipper had promised to explain to all of them the new mystery he'd managed to uncover after Mabel's welcome home dinner.

She couldn't help but smile at that. Life had been very boring in Dipper's absence. Oh, sure he hadn't been entirely gone. They spoke all the time on Skype, and over the phone, but it hadn't been the same and that was the problem. Sure, her life had gone on much the same way it always had prior to Dipper's appearance in her life. Granted, there wasn't a Mystery Shack anymore, but she'd found another job working at the GameStop in the mall. She got up, went to school, went to work on weekends, and dated, all the usual things. And that was the problem. It was all so…ordinary. During those months in the summer of 2012, she had accomplished something worth doing. Something to be proud of, she'd helped save her hometown, save her country, save Earth, save mankind. After that, an ordinary life seemed poor by comparison

But despite her…frustration with ordinary life, she missed her best friend even more. That more than anything was why she'd decided to apply San Francisco State. It'd be more expensive as an out-of-state student, but she had the scholarships and the financial aid to cover it. It'd be a chance to get away from home, and, be near one of her closest friends. She hated the thought of abandoning her other friend, but when she told them, they'd all decided to apply with her. And to her amazement, they'd all gotten in.

Plus, there was the faint hope, that maybe she could do something meaningful with her life again.

Now, as Dipper closed the dining room door, his parents having gone into the living room to recuperate, she saw the determined, and faintly horrified look on his face. She remembered the moments of stark terror, the moments of despair, at the possibility of watching everything they knew and everything and everyone they loved sink into the abyss.

_Be careful what you wish for._

"All right guys," Dipper said, voice pitched loudly enough to be heard clearly by everyone in the room, but hopefully not by his parents. "I know some of you came down here expecting to have fun, get to know the place, and experience the best the Bay Area has to offer. But…circumstances have changed. In the last few months, a new movement among the Bay Area restaurants has cropped up. One that resonates uncomfortably with a certain child psychic that used to be quite popular up in Oregon a few years back."

She and most everyone else in the room chuckled derisively.

"It's called the Epicurean Club. Now it's entirely possible that I'm just being paranoid, but something tells me I'm not…"

"Let me get this straight," Wendy said very slowly and softly when Dipper was done. "You're saying that this Epicurean Club could very well be eating children. Based on a smarmy brochure and a kidnapping that just happened to occur an hour after you read it."

"I don't know what I'm suggesting, Wendy," Dipper responded tartly, leaning forward across the table "All I know is that both things have…a wrong shape to them. One, this Epicurean Club seems to have expanded way too fast."

"Maybe they just serve really good food at these meetings?" Robbie pointed out from where he was sitting with Tambry across from her at the table.

"Perhaps," Dipper conceded, "and that's why I hope to God I'm wrong. Both because I don't like the idea that anyone could be that depraved, and I don't want my Mom to get mixed up in something like that. But the kidnapping of Jessica Ocampo also doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense either."

"How so?" Wendy asked.

"I don't want to be blunt," Dipper began, looking apologetically at his friend across the table, "Especially when it comes to your sister, Melanie. However, most of the time when you have a child abduction case, or any sort of kidnapping at all, the abductors number at most one or two people who have some sort of personal or familial connection to the victim. It's not usually four people wearing ski masks and driving an unmarked car. What's more sexual predators, which contrary to media hype, are the rarest kidnappers of children; usually abandon the attempt if they encounter any sort of significant resistance. Mabel, Candy, and Grenda engaged the kidnappers immediately on hearing Jessica's screams. Instead of retreating, they stayed and actually fought them until they could secure her and get out of there. Her family has no money and no political or social influence of the kind that would make running that sort of risk worthwhile. Also, there's been no ransom demand, no demands of any kind in fact. There are exceptions to that rule, of course, and leaving aside the still horrifying possibility of these being unusually persistent sexual predators, the odds are overwhelming in favor of them being after her for some ulterior reason."

No one in the room made a sound after that, as everyone there digested the fact that Dipper's reasoning, at least when it came to the kidnapping, made sense. But Wendy, the girl who grew up hunting with her lumberjack family, realized something else.

"You're logic is sound, Dipper," Wendy said a moment later, feeling faintly stick to her stomach. "Yes, predators, both the human variety and in the animal kingdom, will usually back down if they encounter significant resistance. Except, in the case of animals, when food is scarce, and they're starving. Now, if your mother's restaurant has joined the Epicurean Club, and if what you're suggesting is true, then they're going to…" she sighed, trying to find the strength to voice the single most disgusting thought that she'd ever had. "Going to need more. Kids." She felt her gorge rise in her throat.

Melanie however, was the one who shot up from the table and barreled upstairs towards the bathroom. Wendy, and everyone else at the table winced with a mixture of disgust and sympathy at the sound of retching that filtered back down the stairs.

After a few moments, a somewhat paler, looking Melanie came slowly, trembling down the stairs before sitting back in her chair.

"You all right?" Pacifica asked from her position to Dipper's right.

"I'm fine," Melanie said, nodding. She looked over at Dipper. "Continue, if you must."

Dipper stared at her sympathetically. "The simple fact remains that we have no leads one way or another on her kidnapping. We have no choice but to investigate the Epicurean Club and hope that it either connects to her kidnapping or we get some sort of significant lead on that from some other quarter."

"So what do we do?" Wendy asked after a moment, fearing that maybe she hadn't seen the worst of human nature during the Gravity Falls crisis. But there was determination there to, if there was something to be afraid of here, to put a stop to it, whatever it was.

"We investigate. We talk to some of the club's members, we look into the histories of the restaurants that have the Epicurean Club sticker in their windows. And we dig into the background of this Thomas Salvatore. The Board of Big Mysteries has been cleared and set up in my room. Anything of significance, we find goes on there. Tomorrow we get to work. I hope I'm just being paranoid about the Epicurean Club and it's link to this kidnapping. And that if I am being paranoid, we run across some lead to Jessica's whereabouts over the course of this investigation."

"And if you're not," Melanie said, still sounding weak, and utterly terrified that her worst nightmares over the last day didn't even approach the half of the truth. "Being paranoid, I mean."

"Then we put a stop to it," Dipper said visibly, swallowing a lump in his throat. "One way or another. And God help us all."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I put a reference to a classic science fiction series owned by AOL Time Warner and J. Michael Straczynski in here. Kudos to whoever recognizes it.


	3. To Face the Gathering Storm

"O what fine thought we had because we thought

That the worst rogues and rascals had died out."

-W.B. Yeats,  _Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen_

 

_Two Weeks Later_

Dipper Pines sat in his booth at the Ox and Lamb, staring about him at the cavernous red-brick dining room of his mother's restaurant, scanning the room, waiting for the interview contact Pacifica had spoken too earlier to show up. He was anxious. This was their first real lead. The webmaster of the Epicurean Club's website had agreed to show up, having been told that Dipper was being forced to go to summer school and he had to do a report on a contemporary movement in the Bay Area. He hoped to get to talk to someone actually on the inside with this movement.

And after two weeks of getting nowhere he was willing to take whatever he could get at this point. The security concerns for this investigation were twofold. One, preventing the Epicurean Club from finding out someone was actually seriously investigating them for more than just the cursory research required for a high school report and two, preventing his parents from finding out the same. In the case of the former it was because of the Epicurean Club. If his suspicions about them were correct, they had the personnel willing to make people asking too many questions disappear, or at the very least threaten them with forced disappearances. For the latter, he doubted his parents would believe him anyway. He couldn't exactly say he blamed them, he didn't  _want_ to believe it himself. To that end, however, he'd divided his friends into three teams of four people each. One team would be actively investigating the movement in as low-key a manner as humanly possible, while the other two would go about their daily lives as best as they could, albeit keeping their eyes and ears peeled and reporting anything suspicious to him or Wendy. It also allowed them to function as a mobile reserve in the event something big happened.

Like this. Consequently, he had his own people close by. Mabel was sitting with Wendy, Robbie, and Tambry behind him, well-placed to intervene in the unlikely event his guest suddenly lunged at him from across the table. His mother had come down with a stomach bug and couldn't come into work today, so odds were pretty good she wouldn't find out about this.

"Mister Pines?" A male voice said. He looked up to see a young man of about his height in his early to mid-twenties, well-built but with a bit of a gut, with blonde hair standing in front of them, with glasses.

"Yes?"

He extended his hand, "Damian Locke. Epicurean Club webmaster, we spoke via email on Monday."

"Oh," Dipper said, reaching out and grasping his hand firmly. "Please," he said gesturing to the empty half of the booth across from him.

"So Mister Pines," he said. "You told me you have to do a report for summer school?"

It was a cover he hated using. He'd gotten straight As all year, after all. But what was he supposed to say? That he was investigating the Epicurean Club's possible link to a brazen kidnapping and cannibalism. Particularly when he didn't have a shred of evidence beyond his own suspicions?

"Yes, sir," Dipper said, courteously.  _He doesn't_ look _like a cannibal. He looks like, and probably is a foodie who happens to be really good at IT which is why they made him their webmaster. Appearances can be deceiving._  Gideon  _just looked like a nine-year-old boy being used by his huckster father with a ridiculous crush on my sister. But then again, it's doubtful that the average member of the Epicurean Club would even know what he or she is eating, if they are somehow serving humans in that food._

"So I have a pretty good idea of the food served. But what's your opinion of it?"

His face suddenly lit up with a huge smile, that reminded him briefly and disconcertingly of his late friend Soos. Soos, who at the very height of the crisis that had gripped Gravity Falls in the summer of 2012, had given his own life so that he, Mabel, and every single member of a relatively young species called  _Homo sapiens sapiens_ might live. "Oh, man, it's awesome, dude! The _Casu Marzu_ is to die for, it's even worth the maggots…"

Dipper listened, interested despite himself in the intricate details of how  _Casu Marzu_ was fermented. The large cheeseburger meal he'd ordered lay only partially eaten.

"But my real favorite food is the liver pate," he said some interminable time later, even though it could only have been a few minutes.

"Oh?" He said, shaking himself slightly to clear the fog in his mind.

If Locke noticed he gave no sign. "Yup. Their  _Pate de Foie Gras_ is to  _die_ for. Shame it's the only thing you can't take home."

"Wait," Dipper said, holding his hand up. "You can take everything else, except the liver pate?"

"Yes, sir," Locke burbled. "The recipe is a secret. They'll actually frisk you if you try to carry away samples of it. I know, I tried."

"Hmm," Dipper said, leaning back in the booth and idly picking up a fry and nibbling off of it. It held no taste for him, not after what he just said.

"But what about the chefs that prepare it? They have to know at least."

"Nope," Locke said. "It's actually prepared at a farm outside Sacramento, Briarwood. Chef Salvatore owns it and the pate is prepared their then shipped down ahead of each dinner service. This place, if I remember correctly, should be getting its own shipment," he paused to think about it. "The week after next?"

"I see," Dipper said nodding. "Well," Dipper said, holding his hand out. "Thank you for your time, Mister Locke."

"It was no problem, Mister Pines," he said courteously, shaking his hand. "Good luck on your report."

"Thank you," Dipper said smoothly. "Have a nice day."

As soon as Locke had followed the rapidly thinning lunch crowd out the door, he leaned over booth to look at his friends. "You guys got all that?"

"I got all that," Mabel said, sighing.

"So did I," Wendy said. "You don't think-?"

"We still don't have any hard evidence," Dipper said, "but we at least have a place to start looking. Come with me around the back," he said quickly, sliding out of the booth.

When they were in the alleyway behind the Ox and Lamb, he said, facing the four of them. "All right, So we have a place to start looking. I want you three," he said, referring to Wendy, Robbie, and Tambry, "to go out there and reconnoiter the area. Now, I know you, Wendy, have a ghillie suit, but what about you two?"

"A gilly what?" Robbie and Tambry said simultaneously.

"It's what we hunters use as camouflage when we're out in the field," Wendy said pointedly. "It's a suit covered in netting, vegetable fiber and bits of pieces of foliage designed to make us blend in with the surrounding terrain."

"Are those really necessary?" Tambry asked quizzically. "I mean can't we just drive up and-,"

"No," Dipper said pointedly, crossing his arms across his chest. "One, you're going to have to cross more than a few farms to get to this one, so we'll be trespassing. Two, it'll look kind of suspicious for three people to suddenly drive around the perimeter of this farm. And the whole point of this is to be as low-key as possible."

"Dipper's right, guys," Wendy said, arms clasped behind her back. "We'll park a couple miles away then we'll proceed on foot, much of it crawling, pausing every time the terrain changes to swap out the foliage on the suits we'll be making. Expect to spend at least fifteen to twenty minutes on that each time. Make no mistakes guys, a leisurely drive around farm country this is  _not._  This will be a long, drawn-out, time consuming process. So cancel whatever plans you thought you had, you won't be needing them now."

* * *

The Oakland Coliseum Flea Market was one of the more popular flea markets in the Oakland area, and something that, in another life, Pacifica Northwest would have drowned herself in Lake Merritt rather than patronize.  _But that_ was  _another life_. Ostensibly they were just here to people watch and occasionally browse among the stalls. But they were also here on the off-chance that some of Jessica Ocampo's clothes ended up being sold here. She had no idea who in their right mind would do such a thing, as it was willfully circulating evidence of kidnapping and possibly murder, but there was a chance it could happen.

Pacifica, almost compulsively looked down at the Claddagh ring he'd given her back in March. They'd been at Joaquin Miller Park for the day, watching the sunset…

_Pacifica looked at the waterfall at Joaquin Miller Park, flaring bright orange in the light of the setting sun behind them. She loved coming here, both with Dipper, and by herself, when she needed to relax. It was almost like a little slice of home. And however much she preferred the Bay Area, she missed being close to nature. So she came here. Especially at sunset when the rocks and water glowed a brilliant orange; today however, she was here with Dipper. And Dipper, she'd noticed had been antsy the entire time._

_"Paz," Dipper said softly, watching the water running down to the river below. "I got you something the other day, and I've...kind of been waiting for a chance to give it to you."_

_"_ Oh _?" She asked curiously, turning to face him. "What is it?"_

_Dipper's face turned a beat red as he rubbed the back of his neck. "You know my Mom is Irish?"_

_Her maiden name, she remembered correctly was Jennifer Cassidy. "Yes."_

_Dipper nodded. "There's an Irish tradition of giving a certain type of ring to someone you're particularly close too. It's called a Claddagh ring." He reached into his pocket, and pulled out a small black box. All at once, it seemed that all sound in the forest seemed to die except for the sound of her heart beating in her ears._ This can't be what I think it is, _she thought to herself, her heart racing._

_He opened the box to reveal two silver rings, the front of each one consisting of two hands clasped around a crowned heart. "Now," he said, pulling out one of them. "Each design element means different things. The hands signify friendship, the heart signifies love, and the crown signifies loyalty. Also," he said, softly. "The way you wear it has different meanings. On the right hand with the point of the heart facing outward means you're single. If worn on the right hand, with the point of the heart facing inward, it means you're in a relationship. And_ this,"  _he said, gently taking the ring finger on her_ left  _hand and sliding it on, point of the heart outward, "on the left hand, means you're engaged." Her eyes were streaming with tears at this point._

_"Pacifica will you marry me?" He asked in a strangled voice a heartbeat later. "Not immediately I mean-,"_

_Pacifica lunged forward and kissed him. Hard. "Yes, you big dork! Of course, I'll marry you."_

She looked down at the ring on her finger, as fear trickled down her spine. Not fear of commitment, or of the enemy. She was all in, as a song she'd heard once said, for life, on both counts. It was fear that this new set of mysteries would take the man she loved away from her.

"Oh, my God," Melanie's voice said softly from behind her. "Oh, my God."

Pacifica shook off her ruminations on the ring on her finger, to discover that they were in fact in front of a stall selling bargain shoes. "What, what is it Melanie?"

Melanie was staring down at a pair of black and white sneakers, eyes glistening with tears. "These are my sister's shoes."

"How can you be sure?"

"My mom got Jess a label maker for her eleventh birthday. She became obsessed with it, and labeled everything that she owned." She turned it over to view the sole of the shoe, and the flowery label that said, J.O."

"I know that I can't prove it, I know that there's more than one J.O. in the world, but don't ask me how I know," Melanie said softly. "I just know."

Pacifica reached forward and hugged her friend to her. As Melanie wrapped her arms around her, Pacifica noticed something in the stall behind her. A pair of jeans, with the same sticker design. "She's dead, isn't she?" Melanie said tearfully. "I mean, why else would her shoes be in a flea market?"

"I don't know, Melanie," Pacifica said softly. "But these shoes aren't the only clothes of hers here."

Melanie looked up at her. "What?"

* * *

Dipper Pines stared at the clothes that were currently laid out on his bed. "Are you sure, Melanie," Dipper asked softly.

"Positive, Dipper," Melanie responded darkly from behind her. "These are her clothes, sure as sunrise."

"Damn," Dipper bit out, a dark, black anger filling him. "Just damn."

Jessica Ocampo had developed a crush on him in recent months. She'd always been a bright, intelligent girl, and he knew she'd idolized him.  _Much like I used to idolize Wendy,_  he thought to himself with a pained sigh. Jessica was a bright, likable girl, who loved reading at least much as he did. He could have befriended her like Wendy had befriended him. But something had held him back. Maybe it was the societal double standard that suggested that a boy his age befriending a girl four years his junior at their current ages was suspicious when the reverse wasn't. Maybe he'd just been too busy. Maybe he just…didn't want to have to be the person to tell her that what she wanted was impossible. But for whatever reason, he hadn't befriended her the way he now wishes he has.

Then he noticed it, sticking out of the back pocket, glinting in the light coming through his blinds; a piece of paper. He walked forward and pulled it out, reading it with trembling hands.

It was a mess, with lines crossed out all over the place. But he'd seen it's like before, four years ago, in Gravity Falls, when he'd been pining for Wendy and trying to find out how to tell her how he felt about her.

And on that sheet, in neat handwriting, on every line, crossed out or not, was some form of the words, "I love you, Dipper."

He handed the paper back behind him. To Melanie, Mabel, or Pacifica he didn't really notice or for that matter care at this point.

Dipper swallowed the lump in his throat, his anger redoubling on himself. This girl was so like him at her age, intelligent, too smart by half, and with few friends because of it, and he'd let her down. Hell, what Wendy had said to him once upon a time had been an act of loyalty and friendship. What was his excuse for not getting to know her better? Really? What was his excuse?!

"Those animals," he growled, his hands balling into fists, tears flowing form his eyes. "Those goddamn, mangy, rat  _bastards!_ "

He felt a pair of strong arms hugging him from behind. "It's okay, Dipper," his sister whispered, putting her head on his shoulder. "It's okay."

"No, it's  _not_ okay, Mabel! I could have at least befriended her. If anyone could have understood her it'd have been me and I – _damn it!_ " Dipper reached around and hugged his sister to her as the two siblings cried in each other's arms.

She felt another pair of strong, powerful arms wrap around him and Mabel, and he disentangled one arm from around his sister and pulled his fiancée into his embrace, and the three Pines lay there in each other arms.

While Melanie, unnoticed by the other three at that moment, took the sheet of paper he'd pulled out of his pocket and attached it to the board next to the FBI photo of her sister. With trembling hands she picked up a piece of red twine and tied the two pins together before making the sign of the cross and collapsing into Dipper's chair, her own tears flowing freely.

For Melanie, in thinking of her sister, had let another thought wander into her mind as she stared at her sister's shoes. Something she'd seen at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum during a school trip to D.C.

_We are the shoes,_  she remembered reading,  _we are the last witnesses._

_One hour later._

"Dear Lord," Dipper prayed softly as he sat there, listening to the waterfall. "I haven't spoken to You in quite a while. I'm sorry, for I did what was inexcusable in Your sight and let someone who needed me down. I, in my arrogance forgot my own past, and ignored someone I should have paid attention to. I failed her, and I ask for Your forgiveness, Lord. And I ask for hers."

"I thought I'd find you here," Dipper heard Pacifica say from behind him. He was sitting there, watching the water tumble down the cliffs at Joaquin Miller Park, in, in fact, the same place he'd proposed to Pacifica earlier this year. Using a pair of Claddagh rings he'd picked up at a thrift store. Granted, he'd have preferred to spend hundreds of dollars buying brand new ones from Ireland, but his weekend job as a server in his Mom's restaurant only allowed him so much money. He saw Pacifica sit down next to him out of his peripheral vision. "I'm sorry," she said a moment later.

"It's not your fault," he murmured. "It's just. I remember what it was like at her age; too smart by half, and no friends, and a crush on an older person. I could have been the friend she needed, even if I had to let her down easy on that last part. Sure we may not have been as close as Wendy and I but, she at least wouldn't have died friendless."

"We all make mistakes," Pacifica said, putting a comforting hand on his shoulder. "Or have you forgotten that I lied to you to get you to do my father's dirty work?"

"In all fairness," Dipper said, "While I may have thought that at the time, and yes, it would have been better to just open the damn gates, that ghost was just as evil and dangerous as your father. Yes, it was a dick move to trick me into getting rid of the ghost so they could keep excluding the townsfolk from the party for another century and a half, but that ghost was dead set on slaughtering a room full of hundreds of innocent people if he didn't get what he wanted. So between the two of them, getting rid of the ghost was actually the better option. Your father's a traitorous, murderous asshole who earned himself a lethal injection, but at least he wasn't planning on killing his guests in that particular instance."

"Still though," she said a moment later. "I  _did_ lie to you, and that lie nearly cost you and Mabel your lives."

"You've more than made up for it since then," Dipper said smiling. "I saw you during that final battle, when we were holed up in the Shack, shooting at Gideon's followers with a hunting rifle. You were on fire that day. 'Nature's greatest warrior indeed'."

Pacifica smirked. "I was kicking ass that day wasn't I?"

"Hell, yeah."

* * *

What Pacifica didn't notice in that moment was the brown-skinned man with the ugly red scar on the side of his head, lying perfectly still in the forest behind her, ghillie suit covered with bits of leaves, grass and sticks. He squinted at his scope, targeting reticule centered right on the back of Pacifica's head.

His trigger finger flexed when he noticed her turn his head and kiss the Pines boy, who kissed her back.

A sadistic smirk appeared on her face as he shifted his sight ever so slightly, centering on the  _Pines boy's_ head.  _That seems poetic,_  he thought.  _Blow out the brains of the guy she was fighting for while they're kissing. Let that be the last she sees of him before I blow_ her  _brains out as well._

His trigger finger flexed again when he felt a force roughly push down on his rifle as a dark-skinned, hugely muscled man in his own ghillie suit squeezed hard around the barrel.

"Our orders are to observe them, wait for the moment to take one of them alive, and  _not_  to kill the other one," Killbone growled low.

"I had a very clear shot," Scarhead pointed out, even as he reluctantly pulled his finger away from his trigger. "Besides that bitch killed Ghost Eyes four years ago; got him right between the eyes. I aim to make her pay for that."

"And she will," Killbone growled. "I promise you. But not today."

"Why not?"

"Because our employer wants discretion, if we kill either of them right now, five hundred men and women will stand up where they fell. And they'll have badges and uniforms and their own guns and full police powers, and they'll pick up right where they left off in their little investigation, and everything our new employer is trying to keep hidden is going to come out. And when that happens, he and his inner circle will end up on death row and so will we."

Scarhead sighed angrily. Killbone was right.

"Don't worry," Killbone said soothingly. "When all this is over, we'll have our pound of flesh."


	4. A Race Through Dark Places

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a gruesome discovery in this chapter... just a head's up

"You are My witnesses."

- _Isaiah_  43:10

 

"Are you sure you want to do this, Mabel?" Dipper asked, the sound of the engine of Wendy's car humming in the background.

Mabel Pines shot her brother a hard, determined look. "I'm completely sure, Dipper. I mean, I'm the one who originally swore to get her back. I have to go on this mission. I won't be able to live with myself if I don't. The only reason Melanie isn't going is because they're holding a wake for her sister, you know the one I swore to get back."

The discovery of Jessica's clothes, contrary to what Melanie had said, was enough to convince the authorities that she was almost certainly dead. The FBI had announced that morning that they were formally transitioning from a child abduction investigation to a murder investigation and Melanie's family had decided the time had come to mourn their lost daughter.

He'd wanted to come with them. Desperately.

But the fact remained that someone had to stay behind and keep looking into the Club. There was also Wendy pointing out that, if this mission went bad, they couldn't all end up dead or as hostages. So he'd agreed to stay. He knew that Mabel and Wendy worked well together, they'd gone off together during missions before, but he'd never been out of range to support them if things went to seed, which they almost always did.

That was the other thing. Mabel had sold her participation on this mission to her parents with the already established cover story of a weekend excursion to Sacramento. It was Friday. They expected her to be back no later than Monday evening. That was also the window to complete the recon mission. If at 6 P.M on Monday, total radio silence (other than the "cover" texts Mabel would periodically send back as long as possible to give their parents the impression that all was well) had not been broken with so much as a text message from any one of them, Dipper would assume that Wendy and her team had been lost and to go to the police with everything they had. It would almost certainly get all of them into serious trouble, but it was also the best chance they had of being rescued (assuming at that point that any of them were still alive) and exposing whatever was going on up there.

Dipper sighed. This was it. This was  _really_  it. For the first time, his sister, his closest friend, his only constant companion before Pacifica entered his life, was going into genuinely life-threatening danger and he would not be close enough to bail her out.

"Okay, Mabel," Dipper said softly. Mabel smiled at him and hugged her brother hard to her.

"Hey," she said a moment later. "Don't feel bad. I'll be back. I don't want to think about what we may find up there, but I promise you I  _will_  be back." She unhooked her arms from around her brother. "Mystery Twins?"

Dipper smiled. "Mystery Twins."

Mabel smiled. "I'll see you on the other side." Mabel turned on her heels and walked out the door, shutting it behind her.

"Your sister can take care of herself, you know," Pacifica said from the stairs behind her, as Thompson's van started. Thompson was on this mission as the driver. He'd drop them off at the initial point, before returning to town and checking into a motel. When the time came for extraction, he'd go back, retrieve them, and return them home.

"I know," Dipper said softly. "It's just-this is the first time I won't be able to come to her rescue when she needs me."

"She needs to do this, Dipper," Pacifica said softly. He turned to see his tall, leggy blonde of a fiancée, in a pink tanktop and blue jeans, walking down the stairs towards him. "I remember her telling me about Mermando. She has no more choice now then she did then. Jessica Ocampo is almost certainly dead, but she promised to bring her home. Have you ever known your sister, when the chips were really down, to leave someone in the lurch?"

Dipper shook his head. "No. Hell, even when my body was possessed by Bill Cipher and she was obsessed with that creep Gabe Benson, she got her act together in time to stop him."

"So she'll be fine," Paz said as she wrapped her arms around him, pressing her body and all its…interesting contours to his back. She was wearing her favorite perfume, a violet scent that always forced its way into his nostrils and managed to short-circuit his brain.

Like right now.

Dipper, aroused despite himself, couldn't help but smile. "You're trying to get me into bed, aren't you?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Pacifica said nonchalantly. "Oh, sure I mean I'm horny right now, that doesn't mean I want  _you_."

Dipper, recognizing her game, wheeled around and yanked her roughly into his embrace by the small of her back. "Oh," he said, holding her possessively and shooting her a fake glare of jealous lust (well, fake jealousy at any rate, the lust was real). "Who is he? I'm insanely jealous." There was of course, no other guy, but this was their favorite little game. And he needed the distraction anyway. With all that was going on, they both needed this, this little island of normalcy in the sea of uncertainty and pain their lives had become.

"I don't think you'd know him," Pacifica said airily, smirking even as she scooted closer to him, lips inches from each other. "He's not some rough, uncultured peasant boy like you. He's a wealthy, handsome  _man_  who can turn any girl he wants into putty in his hands."

"Is that so," Dipper growled before he pulled her into a hard, bruising kiss. "He wouldn't know what to do with you."

"Oh, yeah?" Pacifica said, low and throaty. "Prove it."

"I intend too," Dipper growled, grabbing her waist and sweeping her into his arms, and carrying her towards the stairs. "By the time I'm through with you, I'll have you screaming my name and begging me not to stop."

* * *

Sometime later, Pacifica was never sure, she and Dipper lay exhausted next to each other; Her head rested on his bare chest, as he cuddled her to him.

"How was that?" She said, softly.

"Perfect," Dipper said softly, kissing her forehead. He leaned over and whispered in her ear, "Just perfect."

"Good," Pacifica said, her heart glowing as she snuggled against him, exhausted. "I love you."

"I love you too," Dipper said back to her fervently. "More than you'll ever know, I love you."

She settled against him, eyes closing, ready to give herself over to her exhausted state, when her stomach abruptly decided it had other ideas; Loudly enough that it reverberated through the room.

"Hungry?" Dipper said softly.

"Extremely," Pacifica responded.

"I can make a run to Wendy's if you want," Dipper said.

Pacifica smiled. "No, thanks. Shannon's making her burritos when she gets home from work tonight."

"Ooh," Dipper said, with a smile of his own. "Her burritos were always the best. Better than my mom's, but don't tell her that!" He said the last part sharply, causing Pacifica and Dipper to lapse into a fit of laughter. "Seriously though," he said a moment later, when she and Dipper had settled back down. "I could make a run to 7-11. Get you a quick snack to tide you over."

Pacifica mulled it over for a moment. I am very hungry, Pacifica thought to herself. "7-11 it is."

Dipper smiled and rolled out of bed, pulling his clothes back on. Dipper smiled at her, giving her one of the smiles that had made her heart race since she was twelve. Grabbing his Claddagh ring off his nightstand, he slid it onto his left-hand ring finger before grabbing his car keys and heading out the door.

Pacifica smiled, as she smiled every time he wore his ring. While women wore Claddagh rings as engagement and wedding rings, men tended to wear them as  _wedding_  rings and as symbols of Irish heritage. Dipper wore it as both, despite the prevailing cultural trait that only women wore engagement rings in the United States, in the same configuration as she wore hers. It was a statement to her in no uncertain terms: as far as he (and she) was concerned, they were already effectively married, even if they had to wait another year or so to make it official. More than that, he loved her as much as she loved him, and didn't care who knew it.

"Oh, yes," she said to the air around her. "I'm definitely marrying him come next August."

* * *

Dipper sauntered out of the 7-11, shopping bag with two Reese's Fast Breaks and Vanilla Coke. It was completely unhealthy to be sure, but it was their favorite candy bar and bottle of soda.

He was opening his car door when he felt cold metal press into the small of his back.

"Act normal," a deep, yet familiar male voice said from behind him. "Come with me, or I pull this trigger."

Dipper sighed, fear flaring up in his gut. For a moment, he tried to think of ways that he could turn and attack his assailant before he could discharge his weapon. None presented themselves.

The man behind him patted his shoulder and gestured with his head, no doubt as a show for the security camera covering the parking lot. Dipper walked slowly, being guided by the hand on his shoulder and the gun pressed against his back, into the alleyway across the street.

As soon as they were out of sight, he was turned around roughly and pressed up against the brick wall to see a hugely muscled, dark-skinned man staring at him. There were also five other men, all of which he hadn't seen in four years, including a brown skinned man with balding hair and a huge red scar down the side of his right temple.

"Killbone," he said, glaring. "Scarhead. Gone down in the world, have you? You're not soldiers of the Mighty Gideon anymore, so you're back to petty theft and street crime?"

Killbone laughed derisively. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? You, your bitch of a sister, and that blonde whore of yours."

Dipper, seeing red, angrily moved off the wall, only to feel the wind knocked out of him as Killbone, punched him hard in the gut, sending him reeling back against the wall.

"Nope," Killbone said darkly. "You'll leave that wall when we're finished with you, and not one second before. Now we have a new employer, someone you've been investigating. You've been getting close to some things he'd rather keep hidden, so we're here to dissuade you."

Dipper coughed out a laugh. "If a demonic being from another dimension with powers beyond mortal comprehension couldn't make that threat work with me, what the hell makes you think I'm afraid of a bunch of thugs like you?"

Killbone laughed. "Good point. But we have a different handle. That leggy blonde of yours, you know the one you met in Gravity Falls?"

"I know who she is, thanks," Dipper bit out, resisting the sudden urge to try to throttle him.

"Good," he said, nodding, before gesturing with his head to Scarhead. "Because my buddy and I saw you out with her in Joaquin Miller Park, on that waterfall trail? I'll admit you have good tastes. I wish I had a blonde like her. I bet she's a good lay too, huh?"

Dipper, incandescent, attempted to push himself off the wall again only to have Killbone stick his Beretta under his neck, shoving him roughly against the wall.

"Listen boy," he said, growling. "The only reason you're still alive is because if we killed you, the cops would find your investigation rather quickly and they'd find out those secrets themselves. We can't have that happen again, now can we? However, if you persist, you may take us down, but we will take her with us. Now, stop digging and don't go to the police, or the next time that hot little blonde of yours sticks her head outside we'll put a bullet through it."

"And you don't think the same thing will happen if Pacifica is murdered?"

"Oh, I have no doubt that it will, boy," Killbone said darkly, as he and his thugs moved away from him, walking down the alley. "But like I said, you may take us down, but we're taking her with us when we go. Think about that on your way back home, whether or not this investigation is worth her life."

Then they were gone.

Dipper pushed himself off the wall, only to have the full enormity of what they had said hit him with a punch as bad as Killbone's.  _My God, my God_ , he thought to herself, as terror seized him in its grip.  _They got_  that  _close_.  _They could have killed her right then_. Tears began to run down his face as the unthinkable ran through his head. No matter how bad he'd taken Jessica's certain murder, he couldn't imagine his life without Pacifica now. She was the light of his life, and the steady rock beneath his feet. Without her, he'd stumble, and fall, and never get up again.

He ran back to his truck.

* * *

Pacifica Northwest paced anxiously in Dipper's bedroom, after listening to her fiancé recount his terrifying encounter with Killbone and his group of thugs. The group of thugs he'd inherited, after she killed a quarter of their number, including their leader Ghost Eyes, during what, as far as she knew, was still called up in Oregon, the Siege of the Mystery Shack, Gideon's last desperate attempt to seize ultimate power and Mabel for himself. Now four years later, they'd drifted down into California, into the Bay Area, and were now working for the Epicurean Club.

 _On the one hand_ , she thought,  _assaulting Dipper had been a spectacularly stupid move, confirming all our worst suspicions about what the Club's been up too. On the other hand, it's also a desperate move, we're_  close  _to something, so close that they're willing to warn us off openly, in the hopes we'll drop everything out of fear for our lives._

"Paz," Dipper said, from where he was lying on his bed and staring up at the ceiling, sounding for all the world like a man who had resigned himself to taking the worst of all possible options. "I've been thinking about it and I want to recall Wendy and the others and drop the whole thing."

For one long moment, Pacifica stared at him, hardly daring to believe the words coming out of his mouth. She couldn't believe it. Dipper. Her Dipper, backing down from scum like them?

"What?" Pacifica said, utter disbelievingly. "What did you say?"

"I said, 'I want to recall Wendy and the others and drop the whole thing.'"

Pacifica stared at him in shock before anger flooded her. "Are you serious?" She said darkly. "After they've proved our worst fears about them. And now you want to just drop it, let them keep doing what they're doing? Let them defile your mother's restaurant; make her an accessory to the murder of children. Is that what I'm hearing from you? Really?"

"Pacifica," Dipper said, voice cracking with something she almost never heard on his voice, fear. Not just fear. Terror. "They got close enough to watch us making out in Joaquin Miller yesterday. They were close enough to blow both our brains out. If they could do that, then they can easily make good on their threat to kill you if we keep this up."

"So?!" Pacifica snapped. "So what? Dipper, they're  _eating people_.  _Children_. They murdered our closest friend's sister, and you want to  _back down_?"

"There's nothing we can do for her now!" Dipper snapped. "I  _can_  however, save  _your_  life!"

"Damn it, Dipper!" Pacifica said, her hands clenching into fists so hard her nails dug into her skin. "Compared to what these bastards are doing," she growled, ignoring the pain, "my life is a pretty small sacrifice to pay! They have to be stopped and I'd rather die than live with the guilt and the shame that I let these people murder hundreds? Thousands? To save my own worthless hide?"  _And if you really think I'd do that, then you don't really know the_  real me  _at all, do you Dipper?_

"You're not worthless, Paz!" Dipper growled.

"And I refuse to be, what was it you called me, 'another link in the world's worst chain?' Because that's what I'll be if I let them keep doing what they're doing to save my own ass! I'm not worth that, and  _we_  aren't worth that."

"Damn it, Pacifica, I can't lose you!" Dipper wailed, barely restrained terror on his voice as his eyes glistened with tears. "I can't! I'm not strong enough. And if that makes me a coward, then fine. I'm a coward," he delivered the last line with a strangled voice as he stared pleadingly at her.

Pacifica stared at him for a long moment.  _Damn it, Pacifica. Can you really honestly say that your positions were reversed you wouldn't be this scared about him. Yesterday you were terrified that this latest mystery was going to take him from you. Why is his terror at the thought of losing you so unbelievable?_

"Dipper," she said, shamed, a moment later. "I'm sorry. I know you're scared. And I know you don't want to lose me. Hell, I don't want to lose you. Not really, if our positions were reversed, I'd be doing the exact same thing." And that was the truth. She was honestly, sincerely as scared of the thought of losing him as he was her, and she'd probably be just as irrational right now. "And I also know that you don't really want to stop this. You don't really want to let them get away with this."

"No, I don't," Dipper said, woodenly. "But how do we keep them from-"

"From killing me? We'll cross that bridge when and if we come to it. But Dipper, you know I'm right. Even if I do end up dying, if it prevents what we now know to be happening, you know it's worth it."

"I know," Dipper said, nodding, tears running down his face, "And you're right we shouldn't stop, but that doesn't change the fact that I can't, I mean I don't-"

"Know how to live without me?" Pacifica finished, walking over to him and sitting next to him, pulling him into her embrace. "To be honest, I don't know how the hell I'd get through my life without you either. But neither one of us is dead yet, and as long as I'm alive, I'll continue to be your strength, if you will continue to be mine."

"Always," Dipper whispered. "For as long as I live."

"So," Pacifica said. "We keep fighting?"

Dipper nodded. "We keep fighting." She heard Dipper draw a long, shuddering breath before pulling himself out of her embrace. "All right, then," he said, still shaky but with his confidence returning. "I'm going to call Wendy, apprise her of what happened, tell them to be extra careful."

Pacifica smiled desperately, unwilling to give up or not, the thought of dying like that still terrified her. "And I probably shouldn't go outside today."

* * *

The sun was setting the west as Wendy finished gluing the rest of the local foliage, mainly bits of corn stalk and dried grass onto her ghillie suit. She wiped the sweat off her brow, thanking God she wasn't allergic to her camouflage facepaint, trying to clamp down on the worrying call she'd received earlier in the day.

 _The bastards know about us_ , she thought angrily.  _Which means they probably know we're coming._

Not that they should just abandon this mission. She could do it on her own authority, certainly, but she was certain to catch hell from Dipper. Particularly now that, whatever they did, Pacifica's life was now at stake.

 _Damn them_ , she thought. She looked at Mabel. Dipper's sister looked like she wanted to personally drive back to Piedmont and start busting heads.

 _It may come to that_ , Wendy thought to herself.  _And if it does, God help anyone who gets in her way._

"You ready, Mabel?" She said aloud.

"I'm ready, Wendy," she said thickly. "God knows I'd rather be home right now, but I'm ready."

She turned to view Robbie and Tambry as they made finishing touches to each other's facepaint camouflage. She smiled at the sight despite herself. However bad a boyfriend he'd been to her, he had clearly learned his lesson where Tambry was concerned. They were looking at each other with something very close to total admiration, something she'd rarely seen before. She'd seen it on her parent's faces before her mother had died, and Dipper and Pacifica could hardly keep their eyes, or for that matter, their hands, off each other.

And she'd never experienced it for herself. Oh, she'd dated, hooked up, and she was far from a virgin, but she'd never known such a profound love. There was a very good chance, a chance that, she realized now, had been far higher than she'd previously thought, that they might not return from this mission.

She wanted to say something, but couldn't. Right here, in public, on mission she couldn't afford to show any weakness, couldn't afford to portray herself as anything less than perfect. Or there would be casualties.

"We all ready?" Wendy asked. Mabel and the others nodded. "Good. Let's do this."

"Good luck, guys," Thompson said from behind them in the driver's seat. "Godspeed."

Wendy smiled, as she and the others grabbed their Remington rifles (they may not all be hunters, but they all had some experience shooting, even if it was only on a firing range) and slung them over their backs. "Thanks, Thompson. You too. See you on the other side."

They slid out of the back of the van and disappeared into the underbrush on the other side of the road as Thompson pulled away from the curb and drove back down the road towards town. Wendy watched as Thompson's car disappeared down the road.

"All right," Wendy said. "Mabel, take point and let's go."

Mabel nodded and moved out, six feet ahead of them, where she was more likely to spot objects of interest, like thugs working for the enemy, random civilians, or the mountain lions that occasionally came out of the mountains.

The small team quietly stalked through the underbrush to the northwest.

_Six Hours Later_

It was about midnight when, long after they had put on and activated their night vision goggles, repainting the world from pitch black to green light, when Wendy smelled Briarwood Farm, before she saw it. In the nightmares she had about this night, and she would have nightmares for the rest of her life, that awful smell would always be the first thing she remembered. The overpowering combination of feces and urine. Human feces and urine.

"Guys," Mabel shouted from her point position at the edge of the small forest, her mouth pinched in revulsion at the sent. "I think we're here."

Wendy mentally sighed with relief. They'd been on the move for six hours, and her feet, legs and back were killing her. She was fairly sure her feet were swelling, and she wouldn't dare take her boots off to check because if they  _were_  swelling she wouldn't be able to get them back on again. Fortunately, apart from a rather rushed sprint across a rice paddy, things had been fairly uneventful.

Now, her, Robbie, and Tambry sprinted forward again, ignoring the pain in their limbs, morbidly eager to see the farm they'd been headed towards the entire time. Wendy looked out through the edge of the forest, lifted up her goggles and brought her night-vision capable binoculars to her eyes.

It certainly  _looked_  like an ordinary farm, in the sense that there was a farmhouse, lit from within, she could see, and half a dozen barns lined up in a row to the left of the farmhouse. But she also saw what she thought were several rows of sheds at the far end, behind the barn. And that stench, that godawful stench, that forced its way up her nostrils and made her want to vomit up everything she ever ate.

 _My God_ , she thought to herself, even though she already had a sinking feeling of what she as about to fine,  _what must be going on in there?_

"I don't see any security cameras," Mabel whispered softly. "Do we move into the farm or not?"

"All right," she said, fighting her gag reflex, even as she unslung her rifle. "We move in. Make for the center barn first, out of sight of the farmhouse. Mabel, take point."

Mabel nodded and unslung her own rifle before moving silently out of the underbrush. When Mabel had gotten six feet out, Wendy and the others pushed out of the underbrush after her, rifles out, creeping stealthily through the long grass towards the barn.

As they moved towards the barn, the stench continued to get worse and worse, until her eyes began to water.

Up ahead, Mabel reached the barn window, and peered inside. Her entire posture stiffened and she backed away slowly, turning around and frantically gesturing her forward.

Wendy nodded, turning to face Robbie and Tambry.

"I'm going on up ahead," Wendy said, fighting back a fit of coughs. "Stay here, watch our backs."

"Right," Robbie said, grunting in discomfort, yet he and Tambry turned away from her and bought their rifles up.

Wendy wheeled about and sprinted up to Mabel.

"What is it," she whispered. "What's wrong?"

"Look in there," she whispered, her voice trembling. "And tell me I'm not seeing what I think I'm seeing."

Wendy, perturbed, inched forward, and peered into the darkened barn.

"My God," she whispered, the implications forcing their way into her along with the stench.

From one end of the barn to another, there were racks of both boys and girls clothing: shirts, jeans, skirts, slacks, all neatly arranged as though they were in the clothing section at Wal-Mart, and all in the sizes one would expect of children between the ages of seven and twelve.

"Where are the kids then?" Mabel whispered softly, and it was clear she was fighting back tears, even if her eyes were covered by her goggles.

Wendy put a comforting hand on her friend's shoulder. "Hey," she said, as reassuringly as she could, considering she was fighting back tears herself, "Hey, we'll put a stop to it. That's why we're here."

"Yeah," Mabel said, shuddering, "yeah. Where's that godawful smell coming from, though?" Mabel looked around her. "I don't' think it's coming from the barns. She looked to her left. "The sheds maybe?"

Wendy looked at the sheds and fought down a sudden lump in her throat as she saw the three rows of eight sheds just sitting out there. They had windows, she could now discern, and they were dimly lit from within.

"Let's go," Wendy said softly, and the two of them sprinted back to the others and all four of them moved towards the sheds.

As they got closer to their target, a corner shed out of direct line of sight of the farmhouse, the reek of feces, urine, and stale sweat got worse.

"What could be going on in there?" She heard Robbie ask, voice breaking.

"Let's find out, shall we?" Wendy said. "Goggles off." She hit the power button on her goggles and crept forward, peering into the dimly lit shed, and stood there, stock still, stunned into a revolted, horrified, silence by what she witnessed.

Sitting in the dimly lit shed were sixteen cages, barely large enough to house a human being sitting down. And in each one, each and every one, was a child, of every skin color, between the ages of seven and twelve, sitting, bound and naked in their own filth. Each cage was connected to a mechanical hopper connected to a feeding tube shoved down each child's throat. Hanging outside each cage was an IV hooked into each one of their arms

"My God," she heard Mabel whispered next to her. "It's Jessica, on the right side of the room. She's alive."

Wendy stunned out of her reverie scanned the room on either side. And saw her. She was bound to the floor with a feeding tube down her neck like the other children, but her eyes were open, and she was still breathing.

"I'm getting them out of there," Mabel growled before tearing herself away from the window and making run out front to the shed door. Wendy tore herself away from the sight herself and started off after her.

"Mabel," Robbie said quickly, grabbing her arm to stop her. "Wait."

"Let go of me, Robbie," she bit out. "We need to get them out of there."

"And we will," Wendy said quickly, as Mabel fought against Robbie's grasp. "But not like this. Not now."

"What do you mean not now?!" She whispered furtively. "You saw what they're doing to them! They're fattening them up like geese for  _pate de foie gras_." Her eyes widened at the sudden realization. "My God, that's what in the pate. Pate is liver, their livers. Oh, my God," she finished in a strangled voice and she resumed fighting against Robbie's grip.

"Mabel," she growled low. "Mabel, we can't do this now."

"Why not?!"

Wendy sighed. "Do you see the other sheds here. There's twenty-four sheds, and if there's sixteen children to a shed, that means there's three hundred and eighty-four children being held here. You understand that?  _Three hundred and eighty-four_. Say we manage to get one of them out, hell we manage to get all sixteen out of there? When the staff realizes people are missing, what do you imagine will happen to the other three hundred and sixty-eight? They'll likely all be dead by the time help gets back here."

"How do you figure that?"

"Mabel," Robbie said, breaking in, "Towards the end of the Second World War, when Soviet forces were moving through Poland, retreating German forces were desperate to erase all evidence of the Holocaust before it could fall into the hands of Allied forces. They killed everyone they could, burned as much of the evidence as they could, and force marched the survivors to camps in Germany and Austria proper. Now, it's doubtful they could get away with all that, but don't you think that they'll kill everyone left here and burn this place to the ground, go underground for a couple months, and re-establish another place just like this somewhere else? Our only chance to save all of them, including Jessica and put a stop to this once and for all, is to record it. Then hightail it out of here before anyone notices it. We show it to the police and they can storm this place when they're not expecting it."

Mabel stilled, crumpling a bit. Robbie grabbed and steadied her.

"I'm going to record this," Mabel said, softly. Robbie gently let her go, and Wendy watched as she pulled her Kindle Fire out of her jacket pocket and began fiddling with the apps, setting it to the camera mode before pulling off the cover to expose the rear camera.

Before she could bring it up however, a floodlight near the farmhouse suddenly burst into life, flooding the area with white light as punctuated bursts of shouting cut through the night.

"Oh, shit," Wendy growled, bringing her rifle up, "we have to go right now. If we stay to record, they'll be on top of us before we can get away."

"But-"

"Now!" She whispered furtively

Mabel sighed and hastily collected her discarded Kindle cover before sprinting towards the underbrush nearest the sheds. Wendy and the others following after.

* * *

_Eight hours later_

Dipper stared up at the pattern of the paint on his ceiling, feeling Pacifica's sleeping body against his chest. Both of them hadn't gotten much sleep that night, only getting it in fits and starts. It's difficult to sleep peacefully when someone's threatened the life of you or someone you love mere hours earlier. And as for Wendy, Mabel, Robbie, and Tambry? Were they okay? Were they even still alive or had they run into enemy resistance and been slaughtered to a man?

He may had been terrified over losing Pacifica, but if he lost Mabel he'd shut down just as badly too.

He turned his head over, glancing at his alarm clock. It was 8:45 in the morning on Saturday. They weren't due to be reported missing until Monday evening. He didn't know if he could wait that long.

Abruptly his phone vibrated on his night desk. He grabbed it hastily to see Mabel's picture on the phone and the text message icon. Sighing in relief, he opened the message

It was a short, terse message that filled him with dread when he saw it.

W _e've discovered what's going on at Briarwood Farm. Be there in 15 minutes. God help us all._

Fifteen minutes later, Mabel, Wendy, Robbie, and Tambry were gathered in his room, as Wendy and Mabel finished recounting the horrors they had just witnessed.

Dipper sat at his desk, sick to his stomach at what they were describing. And that he had been so nearly cowed into letting people capable of doing what they were doing get away with such an act. Pacifica had been right, more right then even she'd realized at the time, to get as angry as she'd been at him.

More than that, Jessica Ocampo was still alive.

"Guys," Dipper said a moment later. "We need to put a stop to it."

"Yes," Pacifica said, eyes still glistening with tears at Wendy and Mabel's description. "But how? They were forced to retreat before they could gather any evidence, and our story, without proof, seems simply too unbelievable to go to the police with without any of said evidence to back it up."

Dipper sighed, leaning back in his chair. Pacifica was right. Which led to what he was about to say now.

"You're right," Dipper said. "Which means we're going to have to work outside the law to put a stop to it."

"Ladies and gentleman," Dipper said softly, as the sheer magnitude of that decision washed over him. "We're going to have to attack Briarwood ourselves."


	5. The Long, Twilight Struggle

"To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;  
To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night."

-Percy Bysshe Shelley,  _Prometheus Unbound_

 

Silence descended on the room after Dipper made his announcement. His friends stared at him, stunned, as if he'd casually admitted that he was in fact three Emperor Penguins all sharing his body.

"Are you sure that that's our only choice?" Mabel said. "I mean, why not just go back in tonight, stay long enough to get the proof of what's going on, and then get out of there?"

"I don't think that's the best idea," Dipper said. "From their point of view, someone might have penetrated their operation, combined with the recent…warning from Killbone means that although you may have gotten in tonight, they'll be on the lookout for something tonight."

"Wait a moment," Wendy interjected, putting her hand up. "If Killbone threatened to kill Pacifica 'the next time she stuck her head outside,' wouldn't they need to know when she was leaving in order to take her out? For all we know, they could have bugged the entire place."

"No," Dipper heard Pacifica respond before he could open his mouth. "Not long, after Killbone…" Pacifica's face briefly contorted with a look of sheer hate, "…relayed his warning, Dipper and I searched every room in the house, both physically and with RF detectors and our cellphones, and found nothing to indicate any kind of listening device or hidden camera. So unless they have spread spectrum bugs, which can't be detected by the RF detectors we have, and are very expensive, we can still speak freely. We intend to sweep Shannon's place just to be sure."

Dipper knew Pacifica wasn't the one to tell tales outside of school, but even so he mentally sighed in relief that she didn't mention their dustup yesterday. And loved her even more for it.

"More than that," Dipper said aloud, "in this neighborhood, a gang of armed toughs is too…conspicuous to stand out without attracting attention. So we can likely still operate freely at least in our own neighborhood."

"So Pacifica can probably walk down the street to go home without getting her head blown off," Wendy said, nodding. "Well, there's that at least."

"Thank God," Dipper said. "But they do seem to be hanging around in places they know we're likely to go when we leave this neighborhood. The restaurant. Joaquin Miller. But they clearly are either not monitoring or don't know about all of us, which is how we probably managed to sneak this recon mission past them. If they'd known," Dipper said with a shuddering breath, "you never would have made it back alive."  _And very likely every single child being held there would probably be dead right now._  "Either way, guys, we can't risk another recon mission. The next time we go to Briarwood, it has to be to shut it down permanently." Dipper sighed. "And we can't actually plan a mission of this scale without at least some sleep."

A visibly exhausted Wendy, her body sagging with dark circles under her eyes, nodded. "Yeah." Wendy stood up. "One other thing. Someone has to tell Melanie her sister is still alive."

Mabel somehow managed to sigh and yawn at the same time. "I'll do that, right now, as a matter of fact."

Dipper nodded, leaning back in his chair. Suddenly, Dipper felt very tired, like his limbs were attached to lead weights. "Fair enough, but then you need to get some sleep. We can't fight Salvatore and his thugs at the same time we're fighting our own fatigue."

With that, the meeting broke up, as Wendy and the others left, leaving him and Pacifica alone once more.

"Oh, God, Dipper," Pacifica whispered, tears flowing down her cheeks. "I never imagined. God, all those kids, being kept like animals in their own filth-"

"Neither did I," Dipper said, Mabel and Wendy's words reverberating through his head. Dipper gave an ashamed, derisive chuckle. "You were right to get mad at me yesterday."

The only response was the sound of Pacifica's sharp, ragged breaths cutting through the air around them. She rocked sharply back on forth on Dipper's bed, her eyes glistening with tears darting back and forth.

Dipper shot out of his seat, concerned and terrified.  _Oh no!_  Like most people with post-traumatic stress disorder her flashbacks ran the gamut from relatively mild to total recall flashbacks that took her back directly to the traumatic event. This looked to be one of the latter. One of the ones where she didn't even know who he was.

Pacifica bolted off of Dipper's mattress, eyes wild as she tore across the room headed to the door, Dipper on her heels.

"Mommy! Daddy" She shouted, voice cracking with fear and terror, as she clawed at the door. "I'm sorry for tracking mud on the carpet! I'm sorry! Please let me out! Please! I just want to go to the bathroom, please!" Her hands closed around the door knob and it turned.

Dipper slammed the door back shut, interposing himself between her and the door and holding her by the arms as gently as he could. He hated doing it. Hated it. The whole problem was caused by her being trapped in the first place. But he couldn't let her out. Not like this. Not when she had no idea where she really was.

"Mommy! Daddy! Please!" she wailed even as her legs buckled from underneath her.

Dipper caught her before she could hit the ground and guided her gently to the floor. "It's okay," he whispered. "It's all right. I've got you. No one is going to hurt you." He leaned down and felt her pulse through her sweat soaked skin. It was strong, but rapid fire - what he expected of someone undergoing extreme stress. After a few moments, she stirred against him.

"Dip-Dipper?" she asked with a shaky voice. "God, I'm sorry."

"It's okay," Dipper whispered soothingly. He stood up, taking her gently into his arms, carrying her back to the bed. He set her down gently, pulled the blanket and top sheet back over her. He climbed into bed, holding her softly by the waist and listening to her breathing.

Dipper watched as her mind fought its way clear of the memories of her torment by the people who should have been her protectors. They'd seen her as a tool. One to use in their quest for ultimate power - a quest that would have seen the twenty-two sovereign states in what most geographers considered North America destroyed and replaced with an Empire that worshipped Bill Cipher as it's only god, with Preston Northwest as it's Supreme Emperor, an empire that would have bought the rest of mankind to heel. All the abuse was a very conscious attempt to mold her into the callous, tyrannical, cruel heiress. They'd ensured she'd received some of the very best instruction in the arts of war to ensure that when an entire continent was writhing in agony, she could crush all resistance in her father's name.

And Dipper didn't want to think to how close - how very close, they'd come to succeeding even partially. For Bill Cipher, naturally, had no intention of allowing Gideon or anyone else to achieve any of their delusional goals, for it only intended to use the chaos and destruction they caused to achieve its goals of bringing their dimensions crashing together and ending humanity altogether.

But the one thing they couldn't extinguish that one core of basic decency in Pacifica - The decency that caused her to turn her back on the line of criminals and traitors she came from, to become something better, nobler than she'd been before. Who four years earlier had been willing to die to save the "riff-raff" she'd once scorned, and her new friends - who had overcome a past rooted in shame with a strength, skill, and courage that he couldn't have helped but fall in love with.

But she had the vices of her virtues. She was undeniably the strongest person he'd ever known, but she could not do everything herself. And if there was one flaw Pacifica had in spades, was that her pride kept driving her to go off the deep end.

"I need help," Pacifica said softly, still facing away from him. "Don't I, Dipper?"

"Yes, you do," Dipper whispered, cuddling her to him. "You really, honestly need help with this, Paz. You've needed it for years now."

Pacifica shuddered under his hand, hunching her shoulders. He instinctively ran her hands comfortingly over her shoulders. "I know." She sighed. "I can't ignore it anymore. Can I?"

"No. You can't."

"It's just-" he felt her stiffen in his arms. "I thought that I could do it. That if I just stuck it out long enough, I'd wake up one day and I'd no longer find myself thinking of…those days. I'd no longer panic when I'm falling asleep, that I'd no longer shut down at the sound of bells."

"And that hasn't worked," Dipper said pointedly. "You're so strong, Paz. You're the strongest person I've ever known. But even the strongest can still be bought down by their own wounds if they don't get them looked at, and you have been hurt."

Pacifica swallow and she rolled back in bed to face him, face streaked with tears. "I know. It's just, telling you about those memories was the hardest thing I've ever done. I only did that because I love you and felt like you deserved to know! I don't know how I'm going to tell a total stranger about…that."

"Because I'll be right there beside you," Dipper said, softly. "Always."

Pacifica smiled at him. "Then, later," the words "after the current crisis went" unsaid, "I'll go to therapy, I promise." She sighed. "I'm so tired. I don't know how I'm going to get to sleep."

"There's a song that my mom used to sing to me and Mabel when we were little kids" Dipper said softly. He thought back. "Damn it," he muttered, "what are the words?"

"Lay down, my dear sister," a familiar feminine voice sang out. Surprised, Dipper turned around to see his mother, in her pink shirt and blue slacks, walking into the room, singing the song with the proper pronouns for Pacifica. "Lay down and take your rest. I want to lay your head upon your Savior's breast. I love you, but Jesus loves you best. I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight. I bid you goodnight. One of these mornings bright and early in the sun, goodnight. I'll be picking up the spirit to the shore beyond, goodnight. Go walking in the valley of the shadow of death, goodnight. His rod and His staff gonna comfort thee, goodnight. John Divine said 'I saw a sign', goodnight. Lord send a fire, not a flood next time, goodnight. Now A for the Ark, that wonderful boat, goodnight. She really loaded down getting water to float, goodnight. Now B for the Beast at the ending of the world, goodnight. Eat all the children that would not be good, goodnight."

Dipper winced at the…accidental symbolism of that lyric. He glanced down, expecting to see Pacifica mildly irritated, but instead he saw her, eyes closed, breathing softly as she drifted off to sleep.

"I remember right well, I remember right well, goodnight. I went walking to Jerusalem just like John, goodnight, goodnight, oh, goodnight. Lay down, my dear sister, lay down and take your rest, I want to lay your head upon your Savior's breast, I love you, but Jesus loves you best. I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight. I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight. "

When his mother's rendition of the traditional spiritual was done, for a few brief moments the only sound in the room was Pacifica's contended breathing as she slept.

"How long have you been standing there?" Dipper finally asked.

"Long enough to know she just had a really bad flashback," Jennifer Pines said softly, placing her on his right shoulder. "She's really lucky, you know, to have a guy like you."

"I'm lucky as hell to have a girl like her," he said, stroking the hair out of Pacifica's face. " _Mo anam cara_ ," he whispered softly, using the Celtic term that roughly translated as "my soulmate."

"She'd better be," his mother said pointedly, "considering I'm going to find out in another year or so that she's my new daughter-in-law."

Dipper's face turned a beet red. "How did you know-"

"I know you were hoping that, as a close family member, I'd likely pay less attention to you than total strangers," his mom said pointedly, eyebrow raised, "but that besotted look you wear on your face everywhere can be seen from space, and not even I could fail to notice the Claddagh rings on your fingers."

Dipper's faced flush harder, turning around to face her. "Why didn't you say anything before?"

"I figured you'd tell me sooner or later. You may be sixteen, but you're not a child anymore, and I need to let you make most of your own decisions."

Dipper looked at her quizzically. "Do you…disapprove?"

"No," his mother said. "I like her and it's obvious you love each other. Personally, I'd be honored to call her my daughter-in-law, but I just didn't expect to call her that so soon. I thought you two planned on college?"

"We are going to college," Dipper said. "Getting married at eighteen doesn't automatically preclude going to college at eighteen. Hell, the plan is that she'll keep enough of her inheritance to put us and Mabel through school, while the rest goes to charity."

"I forgot," his mom responded thoughtfully, giving an understanding nod, "she is rich, isn't she?"

"Yeah," Dipper said. "Look, Mom," he said pleadingly, "we  _have_  thought this through. There are apartments on campus for students with spouses, we'll keep our jobs, and so on. But the one thing that, in all our thinking, hasn't changed is the fact that we love each other, Mom, and neither one of us wants to let the other go." He motioned to his own Claddagh ring, sitting on his nightstand. "It's why I wear this, even though I'm not married to her yet, it's to remind her I'm as committed to this as she is. That I'm not going to betray her."

She smiled at him. "I understand, and based on what happened, neither one of you has to come in to work today."

Dipper smiled, "Thanks, Mom."

"But, she  _does_  have to go home when she wakes up. I went along with her BS and told Shannon that she was having a 'sleepover with Mabel', because I know you two are responsible and I did the much the same thing when I was her age. But she has to go home later. I don't mean to be blunt, but you were right when you said you're not married to her yet."

Dipper's face heated again as he grumbled out, "Yes, Mom."

He shot his fiancée an anxious glance. He didn't think she was in any immediate danger between his house and his Aunt's, but he was wrong before. If Mabel hadn't gone with her gut and the portal was shut down on his orders, he would have left his other great-uncle to be trapped in another dimension until the heat death of the universe.  _She lives right down the street_ , a ghost of yesterday's genuine terror returning to his mind,  _if I'm wrong I'll probably hear it from here_.

"Relax, Dipper," Mrs. Pines said soothingly. "It's not as though she's in mortal danger walking down the street to Aunt Shannon's."

Dipper giggled anxiously.  _If only she knew_. "Yeah," he said, trying to keep a terrified waver out of his voice, "you're right."

His mom smirked and kissed him on the forehead. "Get some rest, Dipper." She got up and headed for the door. "I'll see you tonight. I love you."

"I love you, too, Mom," Dipper said softly as she walked out the door and shut it gently behind her.

Dipper sighed, flopping back onto her bed. He wished he could tell her what they knew. But they had no proof. His mom would be revolted like any other sane human being. But if he started throwing around accusations of cannibalism without the slightest shred of evidence, he'd look like a raving lunatic…and it wouldn't get those kids any closer to their freedom.

He grabbed his phone and checked his calendar. It was May 17. In little over two weeks, Preston Northwest was going to be executed for treason, thousands of counts of capital murder, and crimes against humanity. And, unless they managed to stop them, a couple days after that Thomas Salvatore and his "panel of top chefs" were going to serve the livers of human children in his mother's restaurant. Preston Northwest would continue on to his appointed end. Good riddance. He didn't know what he was going to do about the other problem, however.

"What the hell are we going to do?" he asked the air around him.

* * *

Pacifica Northwest listened intently to the secondhand RF detector Dipper had given her as she paced the edge of her room at Shannon Cassidy's house. She'd questioned Dipper's decision to buy the pair of detectors back in January, but she'd chalked it up to Dipper's not-entirely-unjustified paranoia about these sorts of things.

She was glad he'd bought it now. They couldn't make any plans without being sure that their every word was being intercepted by agents loyal to Salvatore (or, for that matter, police and federal agents). Dipper and Mabel's house was clean, as far as they could tell, now they had to clean up her place.

Every other room in the house, and there weren't that many, as Dipper's aunt hadn't been married in five years, and she had no biological children of her own, had been clear. She and Dipper had deliberately left their rooms for last.

As she walked the edges of the room, tracing a diligent path around her king sized bed with its green sheets and comforter, her large, heavy oak desk, and her model table, with a diligently collected Cadian Imperial Guard Army she'd been acquiring since she was thirteen, there was absolutely no activity of any kind out of her detector. A light didn't blink, it didn't vibrate, it didn't beep. There was absolutely no indication that the room she was in was being monitored.

She sighed in relief. Not only that she and Dipper managed to get between his house and hers in one piece, but they weren't being monitored here as well.

She turned off her RF detector and took off the earpiece. Heading for her door, she saw Dipper heading out of his Aunt's bedroom, shutting off and disconnecting from his own RF detector.

"Nothing?" she asked.

Dipper shook his head. "Nothing. Which means we can be mostly sure we can talk privately."

Pacifica motioned for him to follow her into her room, collapsing onto her bed. After her really bad flashback earlier in the day, she'd gotten a good five hours sleep. She felt rested, and now it was time to at least try to figure out a plan.

Dipper lay down on the bed next to her, wrapping his arms around her waist. Pacifica instinctively leaned into his comforting touch, snuggling up against him and settling her head on his chest.

"So," Dipper said after a moment, arm still tucked securely around her. "Briarwood."

Pacifica shuddered, her earlier revulsion and horror at what was going on returning. "Yeah. Briarwood."

"How does 'nature's greatest warrior' want to proceed?"

Pacifica bit her bottom lip, what she always did when she was thinking, registering the fact that he was asking her to put on her "tactician and strategist" hat. Pacifica would never admit this to anyone but Dipper, but the times she'd spent learning the art of war were some of her best memories. Mostly because the instructors her father had hired hadn't been inclined to respond to any defiance with savage abuse, but also because, for whatever reason, she'd genuinely enjoyed learning what they had to teach her.

Her…father just didn't expect her to turn on him and use what he'd paid to teach her for good instead of evil.

Now, all those skills were telling her one very important thing...

"We're not ready," Pacifica said with an irritated sigh. "You were talking about coming up with a 'plan of attack' earlier? We're not at that stage yet. See, unlike in Gravity Falls, when circumstances didn't allow for or require anything more than using our wits and playing it by ear, we can't afford to fight like that. Not if any of those kids want to make it out of their alive. And right now, by every sane, professional standard, we're not ready for a fight. At all. It'd be like a pickup football team going up against the Raiders; it'd be a one way trip to the emergency room and/or the morgue, for us."

Dipper sighed. "I know. But the problem is I don't think we don't have a choice. Those kids are running out of time. We may not have time to prepare to the extent that you or I would prefer before going into battle."

"But we need to prepare some or this won't end well. For anyone. For starters, we need to work on our logistical problem. We need more weapons than the few hunting rifles and handguns that Wendy and her friends bought down with them. We need ammunition for those weapons, blanks for training purposes, communications equipment, bandages, safehouses and places to store these weapons that aren't likely to be found, places to train where we aren't likely to be seen. All of that requires money I don't have anymore. If I had my inheritance, or even a generous stipend like I used to have, I could at least get us started, but as it stands, I don't know what we're going to do. It's not like someone with that much money is just going to ring the doorbell out of the blue."

Pacifica jolted as the loud, electronic two-tone beeping sound of Shannon Cassidy's doorbell suddenly cut through the air. Icy fear snaked down her spine, as images of her opening the door right when Killbone or Scarhead pulled the trigger ran through their brains. She shot Dipper an anxious look that mirrored the one in his own eyes. She rolled out of bed and onto the floor, feeling for the two nine-irons she kept under her bed at all times for self-defense purposes. She felt their cold steel in her hand and she pulled the two long, heavy golf clubs out, handing one to Dipper, who took it with a determined nod, eyes flashing.

The two of them moved, as silently as possible towards the door, staying in a narrow corridor away from the windows on either side and positioned themselves against the doorframe. She poked her head out, and looked through the peephole.

And saw two men standing behind two young women she recognized instantly. One was dark-skinned, with dark hair and wearing a red skirt and tanktop, the other had dyed purple hair and wearing a blue shirt and jeans.

_Four years, and they didn't bother to change out their color scheme?_

"It's Vivian and Genevieve," she said, unable to keep the surprise, and irritation out of her voice, "and two guys who are probably their boyfriends."

Vivian and Genevieve. Two people she had no desire to see again. Four years ago she'd thought they were actually friends, but soon after the Mansion Incident, which had heralded the end of her rivalry with the Pines twins and her becoming close to Dipper, they refused to have anything to do with her. They lambasted her for hanging out with a loser, walking out of her life in a very public way at the food court in the mall.

It had hurt like hell, but it didn't take her long to realize that she didn't really need them anyway. She'd had real friends. Between the crisis emanating from Gravity Falls that threatened the survival of the human race, moving to California, and her budding relationship with Dipper, she hadn't even spared the two of them more than the occasional passing thought over the years.

Dipper returned her quizzical look. "Vivian and Genevieve? Aren't those your two hangers-on from the old days?"

"Yeah," she said, as the two-tone report of the doorbell repeated itself. "Do we open the door?"

"Probably," Dipper sighed. "They came all the way down here for a reason, might as well find out what it is."

Pacifica opened the door.

"Pacifica," the dark-skinned girl said airily, as if she hadn't casually rejected her out of hand in public four years earlier. "How've you been, girl?"

"Vivian," she said darkly. "Genevieve. What the hell are you two doing here?"

The two men behind them didn't respond verbally or physically to Pacifica's barbs, beyond mingled looks of irritation and discomfort. Just how had the two of them spun their past with her to their boyfriends?

"Look," Genevieve said, flipping her purple hair back slightly. "I know things between us ended on the wrong note four years ago."

She wheeled around, shooting Genevieve a look that could have blistered steel, "Wrong note? You called me a 'loser sellout' to my face before you and Vivian here walked out on me without another word. By the way," she said, grabbing Dipper's shirtsleeve with her right hand and bodily yanking him and his nine-iron out into full view even as his face flushed. "That 'loser dork,' you rejected me for hanging out with is my fiancé. We both know how to use these golf clubs, so you'd be wise to skip the bullshit and get to whatever point you were going to make."

She smiled a self-satisfied smile as the eyes of all four of them had widened to the size of dinner plates. Genevieve was the first to recover first, shooting her an annoyed glare.

"All right, fine," she said, shooting her a glare that was not only angry but genuinely hurt. "My baby brother was kidnapped in Portland a month ago, by people wearing ski masks and unmarked black cars. We've received no ransom demand, no communication from the kidnappers. But two weeks ago, we heard rumors that the exact same thing happened down here. Now, I'm sorry about what happened four years ago, but you're the only person I know down here apart from my grandparents, and I want my baby brother back."

She gave her a pleading look. "Please help me Pacifica. He's only seven. Please. I just want to bring him home."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Mrs. Pines is singing is "I Bid You Goodnight" specifically the Aaron Neville version (and a more accurate version than one normally finds on lyric websites).


	6. Against Odds Uncounted

"You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it's a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, 'There is a price we will not pay.' 'There is a point beyond which they must not advance'…"

-President Ronald Reagan ( February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004), 40th President of the United States,

 

Mabel Pines sighed, staring up at the ornate wooden ceiling of the La Honda County estate where they'd been training the past couple weeks. Ever since Pacifica's old friends from Gravity Falls shown up looking for their little brother, it had taken some convincing. They lived through the events that threatened not only the survival of the United States of America, but every other country on the planet, so the concept of something that weird and horrible was, unfortunately, all to possible to them. After which they'd let them use this estate, and had agreed to arm and fund their campaign.

She sighed, at the lump in her throat that formed in her throat whenever she thought of the Siege of the Mystery Shack. On the face of it, thirty-five thousand soldiers of the United States Army, the United States Marine Corps, and the Canadian Army with ample Air Force and Navy support should have had no problem. Against an army of mercenaries lured in by the chance to have money and power in the New World Order (an already dead dream, not that they knew) controlled by a nine-year-old with an obsessive crush and an abusive father with more money and weapons then sense. Poorly armed, poorly trained, and even more poorly lead, they should have been falling all over themselves to surrender.

Gideon Gleeful and Preston Northwest's strength was their remarkable ability to use logic and ability to achieve their illogical plans. They'd armed them with advanced weapons and technologies gleaned from the journals. Their commanders worked out tactics to use their new weapons to their fullest advantage. Add to the mix sleeper agents who have been…adjusted by Bill Cipher who wreaked havoc on the airbases and ships that would have provided the fire support and were expressly designed to prevent that sort of slaughter for friendly forces.

And one week before her and her brother's thirteenth birthday, having been foiled with all their other plans, including a plan to bring an unstoppable horde of demons in from Bill Cipher's home dimension, Gideon and Preston, no longer caring about their long term goals, threw their carefully prepared militia army into killing her brother, great-uncle, and grandfather, and capturing Mabel and Pacifica. Sixty thousand militia members, a staggering number that Allied commanders at first refused to take seriously, went up against roughly the same number of American and Canadian soldiers and marines who'd initially gathered to take on the demons.

_The Shack shuddered, sawdust sprinkling down from the rafters under the two explosions that buffeted the wooden structure. The roar of answering artillery was so loud and so close that she couldn't tell what direction they'd been fired from. Mabel paced back and forth like a caged animal, listening to the sounds of battle. The sounds of gunfire interspersed with what she was starting to recognize as the telltale whine of laser rifles, was audible from the half a mile away the nearest fighting was. In the air above them could be heard the sound of helicopters hovering in the air above the Shack, and the roaring whiz of firing rockets._

_"Get those mortars up!" a barely audible voice said. "Those bastards are killing Marines out there, go!"_

This is insane! _Gideon's army demand that they hand over Dipper, Mabel, and Pacifica "or face the consequences" within twenty-four hours was still ringing in her head._

No one _had taken it seriously. They'd taken it as a delusional demand and continued demobilizing to return to their bases in the United States and Canada._

_Then, the 1st Battalion, 186th Infantry Regiment and a battalion of The Black Watch of Canada found themselves completely cut off at Northwest Manor at six in the morning. The two battalions reported that they were taking, of all things, laser fire._

_Artillery and airstrikes managed to open a whole for both units to escape, right before all air forces seemingly disappeared from the field. Both units had reformed half a mile to the north of the Mystery Shack, trying their level best to hold of Gideon's forces in that direction. Within three hours, all American and Canadian military units had been forced out of Gravity Falls. They reformed around the Mystery Shack alongside the, completely ignoring their repeated demands to surrender her, Dipper, and Pacifica to them, in exchange for leaving them in peace._

_Mabel was sick to her stomach._ All this over three people? All this over me? _She'd give herself up rather than allow this to continue._

_Mabel started for the door._

_"Mabel!" her great-uncle said. "Mabel, wait!"_

_Mabel ignored him, continuing to march towards the door of the attic bedroom she and her brother shared the past few months. She was bought short by a strong grip on her arm, and she turned to view her brother shooting her a determined look._

_"You can't do this, Mabel?"_

_"Why not?!" she snapped. "People are dying out there! Maybe if I give myself up, I can convince them to stop trying to get you two and let the others go."_

_"No!" Pacifica said behind him, as the building shook again, under the wrath of another explosion tearing up the soil outside. "You can't convince him to stop! They're too committed now! What are they going to do? Stop shooting and say, 'we're good?' They're in it, it's either win here or die. And even if they win here, they can't possibly prevail in the long run. And even if you could convince them to 'stop', thousands of people have already died to prevent us from falling in their hands. If you give yourself up to them now, you'll be throwing everything they died for away."_

Mabel sighed in the present, sitting up in her bed. They're right. Damn them.

And when a large force managed to break through and invest the Shack directly, they'd fought like demons to keep them out long enough for reinforcements to arrive and for the Air Force and the Navy to finally get back in operation, getting some serious air support out to them.

With that, the tide turned, and with air support finally back in play, they'd broken the siege. They drove Gideon and Preston's forces back through Gravity Falls, harried by constant airstrikes that pushed their forces past the point of collapse.

At the end, thirty-five thousand of Gideon's forces were killed, wounded, and captured, including Gideon and Preston. The total casualties for the good guys, however, had just barely been short of that number. At nearly seventy thousand casualties total for both sides, in one instant, the Siege of the Mystery Shack displaced Antietam/Sharpsburg as the bloodiest single-day battle in American military history.

And it was fought expressly because they refused to turn over three thirteen-year-olds to a psychotic nine-year-old and an abusive father.

 _It's happening again_. She remembered that horrible night where she'd watched helpless as Jessica Ocampo was flung into the back of a van and driven away, only to be found, still alive, being fattened up to go into a liver pate and kept in a cage like an animal.  _Every time_ I _screw up, someone else pays the price._

She flung her covers aside and walked out of her bedroom, eyes downcast and paddling down the hall towards the stairs that led to the living room.

She reached the bottom of the stairs and saw Melanie sitting on the sofa. The TV was on, and she seemed to be staring at a history documentary that she wasn't actually watching.

She sighed, crossing her arms reflexively. Right now, in her mood, Melanie Ocampo was the absolute last person in the world she wanted to talk too. She attempted to edge along the wall into the kitchen behind her when Melanie noticed her.

"Hey, Mabel," she said flatly.

Mabel gave a deflated sigh, collapsing against the wall behind her. "Hey, Melanie."

Melanie gave her a concerned look. "Are you all right, Mabel?"

Mabel swallowed a lump in her throat. "I'm fine, Melanie."

Melanie stood up and walked over to her. "I need to ask you, something. Are we okay, Mabel?"

The totally unexpected question was enough to stun her out of her reverie and she gave her friend a quizzical look. "Of course we are, Melanie. Why wouldn't we be?"

"Well," Melanie said, folding her arms. "You've been avoiding me since you came to me to tell me that my sister is still alive."

Mabel flinched as though struck.

Melanie noticed her reaction, and understanding dawned in her eyes. "Oh. This is about that, isn't it?"

"She was right there, Melanie," Mabel said, sliding down the wall to the floor, vision blurring with tears. "She was right there. I could have gotten her out of there that night and we ran away."

She was sick to her stomach. Wendy and Robbie's logic was sound, but no amount of sound logic was going to make that moment "okay" from an emotional perspective.

Melanie sat down in front of her. "And if you had, yeah, I would have gotten my sister back. Dipper's right though; if you had, no one else would have gotten back theirs. They would have murdered them all to hide what they'd done. My sister wouldn't want that on her conscience, and you don't either."

"We could have attacked, anyway! Sure, we would have all died, but the FBI would have found picked up the trail from Dipper's board, and taken down Salvatore."

"They could have," Melanie said, "but they probably would have started 'liquidating' their captives immediately. We'd still have a lot of dead kids." Melanie shook her head. "Damn it, Mabel! We went over this earlier! Why are you having trouble with this now?"

"Because it's happening again."

"What's happening again?"

"This," she said, waving her hand around in frustration. "I screw something up, and other people pay the price for my mistakes. Four years ago, I let myself get talked into going out with a fraudulent child psychic. He tried to cut my brother's tongue out. Later on, he threw my family off their land, and tried to hold me captive as his 'queen' with a giant Robo-Gideon. I let myself get obsessed with a creepy puppeteer and then bailed on my brother when he needed me. And if I hadn't gotten my act together, the world would have fallen when a demon took possession of my brother to get his hands on the third journal! And that same ridiculous fraud was one of the perpetrators of the Siege."

Melanie gave her a stunned look, as though she'd sprouted mathematical proof of the Theory of Everything. It was a look she'd always gotten, but not for something like this. "What?"

Mabel swallowed, regretting what she said the second it was out of her mouth. Everyone knew what the Siege was - it was the first major encounter battle fought in the United States since the Civil War. It wasn't something people forgot quickly. It was the why of the Siege that was still the subject of a million conspiracy theories. Everyone knew that the Siege was fought because the local government refused to turn over a group of civilians to terrorists, who'd turned out to be far more well-organized then anyone imagined at the time. However, the federal governments of the United States and Canada refused turn over the information regarding precisely who they were fighting to defend. If only because they'd never get a chance at anything approaching a normal life if they didn't.

The conspiracy theorists were convinced that it was because these were the highest of high value targets, presidents, prime ministers and high ranking scientists, that the thousands of dead and wounded could only be justified by them being world leaders.

She'd wondered how they'd react if the truth ever was leaked. That so many people laid down their lives for three twelve year old kids.

Melanie's questioning look abruptly gave way to sudden understanding. "You mean you were the one-"

Mabel cut her off with a nod. "Dipper, Pacifica, and I, yes. We were The Guarded," she said, using the nickname by which, in absence of their actual names, they'd entered American and Canadian military folklore.

Melanie's face drained. "My God," she whispered softly.

Mabel nodded. "So you can understand why I don't like the idea of people paying the price when I screw up. Yes, I understand that I'm not the one who tried to cut my brother's tongue out or the one who attacked American and Canadian forces at the Siege. However, the fact remains that none of that would have happened if it weren't for me."

Melanie sighed, putting a comforting hand on Mabel's shoulder. "You can't blame yourself for the actions of others, Mabel. You didn't slaughter thousands of our soldiers, Gideon and Paz's father did. You didn't shove my sister in the back of a van, convey her to an isolated farmstead and are fattening her up to use her liver in pate. Salvatore is. Yes, you understand that you're not actually guilty of what others have done. You still need to forgive yourself, though."

Mabel looked at her quizzically. "Forgive myself? For what?"

"For the fact that you're still alive."

The two women looked at each other. Part of her recognized that her friend was right. But it was a part of her that still warred with the fact that she'd heard the gunfire, the explosions, the screams of wounded and dying men and women, had knocked a Marine out of the path of a laser blast that nearly hit her instead, had stood alongside her brother and Pacifica at the High-Water Mark, firing down into the forces surrounding the Mystery Shack. She couldn't help but think that none of this would have been happening if it wasn't for her.

"Well," Melanie said aloud. "You think about what I said. I'll go and get breakfast started. We're having bacon and eggs today."

Melanie got up and walked towards the kitchen, disappearing into the dining room and the kitchen beyond.

As soon as the door closed, she heard footfalls down the stairs. She didn't need to look up or even ask to know who it was.

"How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough," Dipper said pointedly. "Melanie's right, you know. Fifteen thousand people died to keep us out of Gideon and Preston's hands. They thought it was worth it."

"They were soldiers! They were doing what they were told," Mabel retorted. "I doubt they wanted to die for three kids, most of whom didn't know us from Adam."

" _Of course_ , they didn't!" Dipper pointed out. "They didn't want to go out there, get shot down and leave their countries defenseless! They sure as hell didn't want to die! They did it because General Richards told them to do it and because it was  _right_. They didn't want to sit there and watch from their perspective a bunch of innocent kids turned into slaves when they could have done something to prevent it. They died so we could live. So  _you_  could live, not so you could feel guilty about not dying with them."

Mabel opened her mouth. What she was about to say died in her throat when the unmistakable sounds of two massive diesel fueled trucks abruptly filled the air around them. The two siblings looked at each other and Mabel scrambled to her feet, running to the window on Dipper's heels.

Pulling up into the spacious front drive were two moving vans and a flatbed tow truck. Strapped to the back of the truck were three of the most beautiful, most expensive cars she'd ever seen.

"Melanie!" Dipper shouted from behind her. "Food can wait! Get upstairs and start waking up everyone! What inheritance Paz is allowed to receive for the time being has just showed up and we need to get everyone up to unpack this."

Melanie acknowledged and stormed out of the kitchen and back up the stairs. Mabel felt Dipper's hand on her shoulder.

"Mabel," her brother said quickly. "Go outside and sign for all of this while I go get Pacifica."

"Right," Mabel said nodding quickly, putting aside the feeling that this was not yet resolved. She tore the door open and ran down the stairs towards the van.

* * *

Pacifica Northwest, hastily dressed in a ratty green t-shirt and blue jeans that she pulled out of her closet at the last minute, stared at the back of the moving van as though it were some unfathomable nightmare from beyond space-time. She had some idea what was in there, though. Control of her business assets in her father's will was to be administered by court-appointed executors until she turned eighteen.

Her father's possessions and records, however, passed into her hands two days ago at midnight when the sentence of death by lethal injection was carried out. Since she couldn't legally have them dumped in San Francisco Bay, she'd decided to have them shipped out here while she figured out what to do with them.

Right now, the general consensus involved liberal amounts of kerosene.

She felt Dipper's presence next to her. "Are you ready to do this?"

Pacifica sighed, leaning into her partner's shoulder. "This isn't going to go away on its own, and the driver can't just sit there all day. Let's just do this."

Dipper nodded. Cupping his hands around her mouth, he shouted, "Open it up!"

Viviane and Genevieve unlocked the cargo door and pushed it open.

"My God," she said after a moment. She felt her legs going weak. Memories of that dark moment in the secret room of her parents manor flooding over, the sounds of the ghost rampaging through her father's house, as she huddled in a ball, overwhelmed at the depth of her line's depravity and treason, mindlessly clicking a flashlight on and off as she struggled with what she saw, came back to her.

In the front of the truck, in front of the piles of records, was the collection of "artwork" that had finally forced her to confront the truth of her line.


	7. Approaching Emmaus

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks."

-Mary Wollstonecraft _, A Vindication of the Rights of Man_

 

The empty drawing room was silent as Pacifica entered the room. The mocking images of the truth of her line together with the show paintings that were commissioned to make them look like honest self-made men and women and great contributors to charity. She stood there, utterly disgusted by the panoply of self-serving lies mixed with utter depravity arrayed before her. Next to a painting of the progenitor of her line, Nathaniel Northwest dealing fairly with a member of Oregon's Cayuse tribe, was the painting of what had actually happened, him cheating the land where Northwest Manor now stood out of them. Granted, that was pretty much par for the course at the time, but she never understood the need to paint one piece of self-serving propaganda and then paint one glorifying what actually happened.

She choked up as she stared at the large painting of her, her father, and her mother, tears forming behind her eyes. She remembered standing for that picture five years ago. They had just gotten back from their family vacation in Hawaii, where she'd had the most fun she'd ever had up to that point in her life. For a time, her parents seemed like real parents, and not just taskmasters deliberately trying to mold her into a tyrannical would-be dictator through a lifetime of violence.

The young blonde woman was seized with a sudden mood as what to do with the paintings revealed itself.

"I once told you," she said, glaring venomously at the painting of her and her family. Manic energy filled her, causing her to pace back and forth. "I intended to fix the name of our family," Pacifica said out loud before she could stop herself. "I had to see a lot of stuff, and a lot of people had to die, for me to realize that's impossible. It's like the name Hitler. That name is soiled forever due to the actions of one man. Your actions, the actions of all of you, have soiled our name. It cannot be fixed, and I'm not even going to try to anymore. I am a  _Pines_ , my children will be  _Pines_ ," she said, giving in the urge to the dramatic. "I disavow any allegiance or loyalty to your name and your House. And your tradition of ruthless competition, deliberately encouraging your children to 'cull their weaker siblings' so only the 'strong' inherit the 'power and title,'" she shook her head,  _we're a_  republic  _for God's sake_ , "has worked against you. I have no cousins on my father's side of the family, no paternal uncles, and the last of the male line of Northwest was put to death two days ago.

"There was a belief among the Ancient Egyptians," Pacifica said in a rush of manic energy. "If one defaced the images that someone left in this world, you disfigured him in the afterlife. I don't know if it's true or not, but on the off-chance that it is."

She tore open the door to the room and ran down the hall. The trip between the drawing room and the bedroom she shared with Dipper was reduced to a blur.

In fact, everything was a blur. She was vaguely aware of Dipper calling her, but it was white noise as she ran back down the hall. In a subjective instant, she was back in the drawing room. A roaring sound in her ears as she swung her upraised axe, the very axe that had fallen out of the head of the lumberjack ghost, into the canvas of her family portrait, embedding herself in her father's head. She yanked it out of the painting to only slam it down again, and again, and again.

She was never quite sure exactly when, but at some point the world came back into focus. Where ten paintings, horrifying reality and self-serving lies, stood in all their arrogant glory, only chunks of wood and canvas remained. Her throat felt hoarse and she realized that the roaring sound that she had been hearing had been her.

"You feeling better?" a familiar male voice said from the doorway behind her.

Pacifica looked at the debris strewn drawing room. "Yeah," she said after a moment, turning to face Dipper. "Yeah, I am."

"It did seem rather cathartic," Dipper said, a smirk on his face, "Spazzy Paz."

Pacifica laughed before she could stop herself. "Spazzy Paz?" she smirked, the obvious retort coming to her lips. "That's funny, Dippy Doo."

Dipper sighed, erasing the joyous laugh that always made her ridiculously happy.

"What's wrong?" Pacifica asked, instantly concerned.

Dipper's face suddenly gained a haunted look. "I've discovered something going through the records."

"What?" Pacifica's heart sank like a stone.

It must've been about her father. Who else could've been? What else did her father leave her in his will? An incurable plague? Did he have a secret clone or something?

"Someone named 'Tomas Sanchez' bought the land where Briarwood sits directly from your father," he said, holding out a piece of paper that appeared to be a land sale contract.

Dipper's unexpected statement brought her up short. "'Tomas Sanchez?'" she said, taking the contract and looking it over. "That's got to be a pseudonym; unless this Mister Sanchez later sold the land to Salvatore at a later date."

"The way our luck's been going lately," Dipper pointed out. "I sincerely doubt that. But if we actually want to corroborate this, we're going to have to explore the records that came with these paintings, which you just reduced to wreckage in a fit of maniacal rage."

Pacifica's face heated. "I did kind of lose it for a bit there, didn't I?"

Dipper walked over and wrapped his powerful arms around her. Pacifica leaned into his touch.

"Yeah," he said, gently stroking her face, "but understandable."

* * *

Five hours later, Dipper flipped, desultorily, through a manila folder in the attic, which was crammed almost to the ceiling with box after box of documents, when a thought occurred to him. "What do you intend to do with those cars?"

Pacifica sighed. "To be honest, I'm keeping one of them, and the other two I will give to you and Mabel."

"They  _are_  nice cars," Dipper pointed out.

Pacifica gave a stilted laugh. "Yeah."

Dipper picked up on the tone of her laugh immediately. "You're worried about tomorrow." It wasn't a question.

Their current table of organization had Dipper as the commander, Wendy as his second, and Pacifica and Mabel as the leaders of their Alpha and Bravo squads. However, the gorilla in the room was that he and Pacifica were on call as servers tomorrow night, the night of the Epicurean Club dinner service. Meaning that he and Pacifica, unarmed and without support, were going to have to face Salvatore and his people. Wendy would be leading the return to Briarwood, with Mabel acting as her second, leaving Robbie and Tambry to lead the squads. Dipper didn't want to think about the things that could go horribly wrong.

"Yeah," Pacifica said. "I wish we could be there with them."

"Me too, but we can't. Someone has to actually confront Salvatore directly, and someone has to keep that plate from being served. Children were murdered to make them. And if we're going to be putting a stop to what they're doing, we have to put a stop to that, too."

"I know," Pacifica said, visibly swallowing and fiddling with her engagement ring. "It was a hell of a ride, wasn't it? Us."

Dipper smirked, despite the lump in his own throat. He knew what she was thinking. He had thought of it himself. "What do you mean?"

"Even if we win tomorrow, we're still committing multiple felonies, up to and including capital murder," Pacifica said, her bottom lip trembling. "They'll take us away, try us, almost certainly convict us, and send us to separate prisons for the rest of our natural lives. And while you, me, Mabel, Melanie, Vivian, and Genevieve, can't be sentenced to death, Wendy, Robbie, and the others can. I know we all agreed that if it saves those kids, it's worth it, but we'll never see each other again. I'll-I'll never touch you again. Never feel your arms around me again." Her beautiful blue eyes began glistening with tears.

Dipper reached out and took Pacifica in her arms. "I don't know what will happen tomorrow, but to quote a wise fictional bartender, 'if a man is convinced he's going to die tomorrow, he usually finds a way to make it happen.'" He kissed her softly. "We have to hope things will work out, or they won't."

Pacifica sighed. "I know."

Dipper cocked his head, leaning in to kiss her again, when he saw it, glinting in the afternoon sun filtering through the stained glass window beside Pacifica's head. The corner of a photograph.

He pulled back. "What's that?"

Pacifica, eyes closed and mouth open in anticipation, jerked, giving him a curious look. "What?"

"This," Dipper said, reaching behind her and grabbing a photograph. It was a group portrait photograph. In the picture, there was a group of well-dressed men and women, including Pacifica's thrice-damned parents, standing in the living room of the long-destroyed Northwest Manor, with the caption in elegant gold filigree, "Northwest Fest 2011".

He suppressed an irritated sigh, eyes glazing over. He'd forgone kissing Pacifica for  _this_? He was about to throw it aside and see if Paz was still in the mood. However, a man to the right of Pacifica's mother Priscilla caught his attention. A tall, lanky man, with brown hair and eyes and an angular face, the face that had rubbed him seven kinds of wrong way the second he'd seen it. Thomas Salvatore.

"It's him," Dipper said softly. "He's right here."

"My Dad knew him?" Pacifica whispered. With a disgusted sigh, she grabbed the folder Dipper had. She pulled it out of and opened it up roughly.

"What is it?" Dipper asked after a moment of watching Pacifica's eyes scan the document over and over again.

"What is it?" He asked, louder this time.

"It's an excerpt from my father's journal," she said, handing it over to Dipper. "Take a look."

Dipper read it, the color draining from his face. "My God," Dipper said after only a few seconds, jamming his hand into his pants and yanking his phone out so hard that he almost dropped it.

Fifteen minutes later, Dipper watched as Wendy, Mabel, Robbie, and Tambry filed into the dining /conference room.

"What happened?" Wendy asked immediately, as they took their places at the table.

"Our luck has been…interesting lately," Dipper said, leaning back into his chair at the head of the table. "First we get this place, and the funding, money, and material we need. And now, the government hand delivers us the final piece of information we need to stop Salvatore."

Wendy, his sister, and the others gave him quizzical looks.

"Apparently, Salvatore and Preston Northwest knew each other."

"Oh, sweet Jesus," Wendy exclaimed in a guttural voice as her head hit the table. "I thought we were done with that son of a bitch two days ago! What's next, is Gideon going to come ringing the doorbell?"

Silence descended on the room as everyone froze, ears straining for the sound of a ringing doorbell. More than a little fear trickled down Dipper's spine, images of Gideon's shears slashing as he tried to cut out his tongue. He glanced over to see Mabel's fingernails digging into the heavy oaken dinner table, eyes as wide as dinner plates.

After a moment, Dipper released the breath he didn't realize he'd been holding, along with everyone else in the room.

Wendy, her face flushing a deep red, said, "God, I'm sorry guys."

Dipper sighed. "It's okay, Wendy."

"Wendy," Mabel said, still shooting her a death glare. "I love you like a sister, but if you ever make a joke about Gideon again…"

"Point taken," a still mortified Wendy responded.

"Now that that's out of the way," Dipper said, "let us continue. Pacifica?"

Pacifica stood up from her seat, and circled the table, handing each of them a copy of the Preston Northwest's journal entry.

"Nearest as we can tell," Pacifica began. "My fa-I mean  _Preston_ ," she corrected herself sharply. "Apparently, knew Thomas Salvatore when they were both in school. Salvatore attended the Culinary Institute of America's Hyde Park campus when Northwest was attending Columbia. They apparently met when he was out with some of his 'friends,' at a society party in Hyde Park. He apparently saw great things in him. Which is odd, particularly if you look at his transcripts on the last page."

Dipper looked down at them. He'd gotten the occasional A, but for the most part it was a run of straight Bs and Cs. Granted, they were Bs and Cs from a premier university, but they were still Bs and Cs.

He couldn't help but smirk in family pride. His mom attended the Culinary Institute of America's Hyde Park campus as well, while working two jobs, in addition to Pell Grants and loans and her work at the C.I.A.'s American Bounty Restaurant - and she never once gotten lower than a B+ on anything, graduating fourth in her class with a 3.9 GPA. She even got several job offers from the best restaurants in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

But his mom's dream had to return home to the Bay Area and open a successful chain of family restaurants. That dream hadn't exactly been satisfied due to California's struggling economy. And more than once, they'd talked about pulling up stakes and moving to Austin, Texas with it's much better economy. But her one restaurant was still very successful, and neither he nor his sister had ever had to worry about going hungry.

It was why she'd been so happy to get into the Epicurean Club. The rich clientele coming in would make them vast amounts of money, so much so that she could finally open a second restaurant in the area, giving her mom's fading dream of a chain of restaurants a shot in the arm.

Their mom wasn't a saint. She had an ego, someone in her position, who achieved what she had achieved even in part, had to believe they were the greatest in the business in order to achieve anything. She liked the finer things in life, but she had a very powerful sense of morality and right and wrong. She paid her servers minimum wage in addition to their tips, even though the law specifically allowed servers to be paid two dollars and seventy-five cents an hour on the frequently erroneous assumption that they could make up the shortfall solely with tips. She served quality food and, unlike her great-uncle in law, did not "regularly commit massive tax fraud."

And she loved children, and not just her own. Every scrap of surplus food she could spare was given over to food banks. She bent over backward to assist Melanie's far less better off family with everything she could since Jessica's kidnapping. And if he allowed them to actually get away with serving human liver in her restaurant, she'd probably put a bullet in her own head.

That's why he couldn't lead the attack on Briarwood himself. He had to stop Salvatore from destroying his mother. It was the only way to prevent Thomas Salvatore from managing to slink away and do this again.

"More than that," Dipper said aloud. "It appears that Preston Northwest originated the Epicurean Club. It started out as a matter of fact, as an idea for a formal chain of restaurants. Unfortunately, his own start-up restaurants never seemed to quite get off the ground."

He looked down at the income figures, Epicurean Delight, Salvatore's first restaurant. According to the documents in the Northwest Files, it treaded water the first six months in operation, before finally going belly up, being forgotten in the intense restaurant market of the Bay Area in California. Same for The Alhambra, his second restaurant: it did okay for a few months, but it didn't stand out so it went out.

"Which stands in stark contrast," Wendy responded, "with the statements in their brochures and website that Salvatore's restaurants were 'roaring successes' that proved his culinary mastery to the world."

"More than that," Dipper said, pointedly. "He apparently didn't take the failure of his restaurants well. It says here that Salvatore was apparently booked by the SFPD on disorderly conduct and assault charges when he attacked a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle for saying his food 'lacked originality.'

"Apparently," Pacifica pointed out, " Preston got annoyed with the repeated failures and brushes with the law, and refused to bankroll another one. There's a letter Preston sent him that states, 'either come up with something original or never darken my door again.'"

Dipper sighed. "At that point, Salvatore responds with a letter of his own stating that he intends to embark on a world tour to 'find inspiration.' There's not a complete itinerary, but at one point he receives a letter from Salvatore that I find particularly…chilling.

 _"Preston,"_  he read aloud, " _I've finally found inspiration! What I need to make a restaurant that can survive on its own. I learned in the Marquesas that the locals used to cook long pig. I was fascinated. I asked around, and discovered to my dismay that no one there cooked it anymore, but people in the Indonesian portion of New Guinea did. So I went to West Papua, among the Korowai people. Most people claim they stopped cooking it themselves, but I found the few clans, deep in the Indonesian jungle, who did. And let me tell you, it was_  succulent."

He could barely get through that sentence without vomiting. "Long pig" was a Polynesian term in historical records of European missionaries for humans who had been cooked and eaten in the manner of a pig. He didn't know what the Korowai called it, but it didn't matter.

Pacifica sensed him having difficulty controlling his gag reflex because she continued. "According to this, he begged Preston for money to buy up some rural farmland where he could work out 'recipes for using this new animal.' He agreed, and under a false name, sold him the land where Briarwood sits for pennies on the dollar, in the hopes that Salvatore's 'culinary research' would bear fruit.'" Pacifica gave a disgusted sigh. "Now, I haven't seen any conclusive proof either way that my Dad knew what 'long pig' was. However, later on, he said that he tried Salvatore's 'long piglet liver,' and agreed, to further underwrite it, resurrecting the dream of a new restaurant chain specializing in unique foods from exotic countries. And considering that he had plans to eat our butler in the panic room during the Lumberjack Ghost's rampage, I can't help but think he did. He'd apparently received ten million dollars to both further his 'research' and to get back into the restaurant business when his chief benefactor was suddenly and violently was thrown down a year later."

Wendy sighed, leaning back in his chair. "So basically, without Preston Northwest's logistical backing, Thomas Salvatore would have gone nowhere. While we've thought we were fighting a new problem, it turns out we're still solving the last problem. Great."

Dipper, now fairly sure that he wasn't going to vomit all over the table, rejoined the conversation. "The main Northwest line," he stared at his beautiful, physically athletic, fiancée with a look of unabashed adoration, "with one major exception, has been a blight on this country and  _Homo sapiens sapiens_  as a whole for the past century and a half. He was paid off by the U.S. government in a desperate attempt to erase Quentin Trembley from American history, not realizing that they gave that money to a suave sociopath with not only long-range plans for ultimate power, but with sadistic tendencies. This ensured that they launched whatever projects and plans they wanted, both to further their own goals for ultimate power and for, to put it bluntly, 'shits and giggles.' Simply executing one man isn't going to automatically undo the plots and schemes, and the damage from them, that man, his predecessors and allies put into place. That's a lifetime's work, maybe even a couple lifetimes. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now, we have to solve this problem. Now we've drawn up and finalized the attack plan against Briarwood itself. However, Paz and I have to be the ones to confront Salvatore publicly and expose him to his followers, most of whom outside his inner circle have been duped. Expose him, we destroy whatever social support base he has and alienate anyone with the resources to help him go to ground and try this again in a couple years under an assumed identity. Hell, they'll probably help us subdue him."

"Yes, but how?" Robbie asked. "Even if this attack is successful, it won't hit the twenty-four hour news cycle immediately. It'll be the word of kids a couple months shy of their seventeenth birthday against his, all he and his inner circle," he said, referring to the chefs he had working with him, several of whom worked for top restaurants and had cooking shows on the  _Deliciousness Channel_. "All they have to do is pretend they didn't know anything, and all Salvatore has to do is storm off in a pretend huff before immediately making a run for it; and if that happens there's a good chance he might not be located for years, or never."

"Ah," Dipper said, "but you're missing a key detail here. He doesn't take criticism well and is the type of person to fight his critics until hell freezes over. Paz and I intend to throw the accusations of cannibalism in his face and insult his food repeatedly until we get a reaction. Knowing him as we know him now, it'll probably be so disturbing that it'll turn the 'rank-and-file' Epicurean Club member against him. He won't be able to get out of the  _building_ , let alone make an escape down any ratlines he has set up to help him get out."

"That's the other thing I'm concerned about, Dipper," Wendy said, straightening in her chair. "There are a dozen restaurants in the Bay Area affiliated with the Epicurean Club movement. If we pull of this attack, and manage to get the children evacuated, they'll flood the Sacramento area hospitals. And when that happens, it won't take the media or law enforcement to put two and two together. And when  _that_  balloon goes up, the Bay Area is going to explode into a flurry of rioting, staring with angry mobs attacking every restaurant in the area that has an Epicurean Club sticker, including your own."

Dipper sighed, and leaned back into his chair. "I know. But it's a risk we have to take. Salvatore needs to be stopped on both fronts. It's going to get messy, it's going to get ugly before it's over. This is one of those situations where there will be no clear winners, but plenty of losers. With the possible exception of those kids, but it has to be done."

Silence filled the room. No one spoke. No one had too. They all knew he was right.

"Well," he said a moment later. "We have a busy day tomorrow, all of us. I suggest we all eat and turn in early. Dismissed."

With that, the meeting broke up, everyone filing out of the room, including Pacifica. Alone, he looked up at the ceiling, in the general direction of the drawing room Pacifica had trashed earlier in her rage, an idea occurring to him.

* * *

Pacifica sighed as she sat in the comfortable red armchair in the bedroom she shared with Dipper. She idly flipped through her copy of  _A Storm of Swords_ , but not really paying attention as images of her friends being mowed down like hay by a hidden machine gun nest played over and over in her mind. Followed by images of Dipper lying dead on the floor of his mother's restaurant, a meat cleaver buried into his skull.

She wanted to curl up in a ball and cry in bed. More than that, and she cried tears of burning shame at this. She struggled to hold back the urge to beg Dipper to let this whole situation go and run away with her.

 _Lord,_  Pacifica prayed,  _Let this work out. Please don't forsake us._

Her phone abruptly vibrated on her desk.

Hey, Dipper's short text said, Come see me at the bonfire pit. I have something I think might take your mind off tomorrow.

Pacifica, curiosity piqued, plopped her book down on the table, grabbing her phone and keys and walking out the door.

Pacifica crested the small hill and stopped dead in her tracks. To see Dipper, bathed in shadow from the sun setting in the west, standing in front of the large, shallow bonfire pit in the largest clearing of the estate's forest.

She stopped and smiled. The bonfire pit was filled up, and Dipper stood there with an unrolled sleeping bag and a picnic basket. She caught Dipper's meaning immediately, and lightness seemed to take her steps as she skipped down the hill.

"Hey, babe," she said, walking over him. "What's all this?" she tried to ask as casually as possible.

"I know what I said about having to believe we'll succeed tomorrow, otherwise we will fail. I wasn't wrong, but I'd be lying if I wasn't as scared as losing you tomorrow as you are of losing me. So if tonight truly is going to be the last night we will ever be allowed to be with each other, let it be a night to remember." He handed her a gas lighter and gestured with her head, to the bonfire pit. "Care to do the honors?"

Trembling in anticipation, not fear, Pacifica took the lighter and walked over to the pit. She stopped, breath dying in her throat. While there was dried sticks and grass for kindling, the bulk of the fuel for the fire was the same wood and canvas with oil paint she destroyed before. Indeed it seems that Dipper, and probably Mabel, had taken every scrap of those paintings they could out of the drawing room and put it out there.

The meaning could not be clearer. Whatever happened tomorrow and the days after they should face them together as  _Pines_. It was time to consign the last links of her personal connection to the family she'd been born into to the flames and never look back.

Pacifica pulled the trigger on the lighter and touched the fire to the wood three times. The flames caught in the dried grass and wood as began to spread quickly.

She turned to face Dipper Pines, the love of his life and walked over to him. Dipper took the lighter from her hand and set it back into the box. He pulled her into a hard bruising kiss, pushing her gently but firmly in the direction of his sleeping bag…

Behind them, the pyre of Pacifica's past burned hot and fierce.


	8. There All The Honor Lies

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,  
So near is God to man,  
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,  
The youth replies, 'I can.'"

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Voluntaries"

 

_17:30 hours Pacific Daylight Time_

The light of the setting sun filtered through the drapes as Wendy Corduroy stared at herself in the mirror. The tall, slender, green eyed young woman was clad all in black with her normally long red hair pulled back into a bun. Buckled around her waist was a belt was a holster carrying a Beretta M9. Unlike the M4 waiting in the van, this was one she legally owned, a birthday gift from her father.

 _Relax, Wendy_.  _You've been hunting since you were eight years old, this is no different_. Almost immediately the two obvious exceptions to that rule popped into her head. Except this time she's hunting members of your own species. And they can shoot back. Yeah.

She sighed. She shouldn't have to be doing this. Legally, she  _shouldn't_  be doing this. At all. Except what choice did they have? It's not as though they hadn't tried to get the police on board. Even after they'd failed to get actual documented proof of what was going on up there, she and Mabel had still gone to the Sacramento County Sherriff's, the CHP, and the FBI office in Sacramento and tried to tell them what was going on.  _No one_  took them seriously. She didn't blame them, not really. What they were describing was simply too unbelievable. It sounded like a particularly unrealistic movie plot that not even Hollywood would produce because it would strain willing suspension of disbelief well past it's breaking point.

Then again, there was the notion that terrorists would hijack four airplanes, fly two of them into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. Then, the passengers of the fourth would revolt and send the other plane crashing into a field in Pennsylvania before it could be flown into the Capitol building. That sounded like the plot of a particularly hammy action movie. Then it happened.

The notion that a battle to protect three thirteen-year-olds would end up costing the lives of thousands upon thousands of American and Canadian soldiers sounded like it was a bad story on the internet  _written_  by a thirteen-year-old. Then it happened.

And people had dismissed reports that during the Second World War, the Third Reich was engaging in a systematic deportation and murder of millions of Jews and Romani as exaggerations and propaganda until 1944, and even then it took years after the war for the sheer magnitude of what had happened to really be known. And, despite the efforts of a few vile people to say otherwise, that happened too.

So here, faced with that legacy, she was, dressed all in black in possession of an unregistered M4 about to take the law in her own hands to put a stop to another ridiculous rumor that sane people dismissed but just happened to be horrifyingly true.

Vigilante or not, she didn't have a choice: the sight of those kids, bound and naked in their own filth, being treated worse than livestock wouldn't let her be. Someone had to stop it,  _she_  had to stop it, even if it meant that she had to swear her life away in the bargain.

"Wendy?" Mabel asked from behind her. She turned around to her friend, giving her a concerned look. At a few months shy of her seventeenth birthday, Mabel Pines was no longer the short, barely pubescent twelve-year-old she was when they first met four years ago." While not beautiful, she was far from unattractiveand only a few inches shorter than her. And as a golfer who had to lug around her own clubs everywhere when on the green, she had already been strong and physically fit. The weeks of physical and combat training had improved on that even more so. Her experiences at the Siege had forever changed her and while she could still be the goofy, out-there girl she'd met in Gravity Falls, she wore her mission clothes as though they were a part of her.

"Are you okay?" her friend asked.

"Yeah," Wendy said, nodding. "I'm fine. I just hope Dipper and Pacifica are okay. That we'll all somehow come through this. I'm afraid I don't look good in orange waiting for my number to be up."

Mabel laughed at her attempt at bleak humor. It was a stunted laugh, though. She knew the stakes as well.

"My brother will do his part, Wendy," Mabel said reassuringly. "And so will Pacifica, and so will we."

Wendy sighed heavily. "Yeah, we will. Are they ready to go?"

"Yes, ma'am," Mabel responded immediately. "We're waiting on you. Do you want to say a few words to them?"

Wendy mulled it over for a few moments, but everything she came up with sounded like it was going to be actively detrimental to morale. Dipper hadn't given one, but then again, Dipper had never done this before, and didn't want to screw it up any more than she did. Besides, pre-battle speeches were the purview of movies, anyway.

"No," she said. "We're on a tight schedule and we have to go."

She looked at her friend. She hadn't been at the heart of the Siege. But she had been there. She was holed up with her father and brothers in the basement, listening to the increasingly battered Texas Division made Gideon and Preston's forces taste blood for every inch of ground in their sector. Unlike Mabel, who'd fought, her father, not wanting to lose any of his children after his wife's Bill Cipher-assisted suicide, made his sons and his only daughter stay in the basement. Not having the heart to break her father's heart, she hadn't left. She, who fought alongside Dipper to stop Bill Cipher and end his threat to their dimension forever, failed to come to the aid of her best friends when they'd needed her most.

Neither one of them held it against her, but she was still privately ashamed, at least partially of it. But she knew how the battle had affected her. Until one day only a few weeks ago…

"I do, however," she said, aloud and walking over to her friend, "have something to say to you, one soldier to another. When I quit my job at Gamestop to come down here for school, I found a note left for me by one of my coworkers. It was  _Ulysses_  by Tennyson. I still remember the closing stanza. 'Though we are not now that strength, which, in old days, moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are. One equal temper of heroic hearts,'" she said, putting a comradely hand on her shoulder, "'made weak by time and fate, but strong in will. To strive, to seek, to find, and  _not_  to yield.'"

* * *

_1500 hours PDT_

Dipper drove his truck into the parking lot of the Ox and Lamb and pulled the keys from the ignition, leaning back into his chair. He looked over at his girlfriend, who was sleeping peacefully in the passenger seat. They stopped back at the house to get dressed in their uniforms, a black shirt and pants, with the name of the restaurant sewn in green on their breasts, before proceeding to work. He checked the time on his phone. 3:00. In another two and a half hours, Wendy, Mabel, and the assault force were due to depart for Briarwood. They were taking two separate routes, that way if one of them, say engine troubles, or police (in which case they were to surrender immediately as the police weren't the enemy and putting up a fight with them would only make things worse down the road), the other half of the attack force would make it to attack Briarwood, even at half-strength.

"Paz," she said, pushing on Pacifica's shoulder softly.

"Hmm," she said softly in groggy contentment. "Dippy, don't stop."

Dipper smiled; he couldn't help it. He'd been on top of his game last night, and so was she. They wanted a night to remember. He guessed they both succeeded.

Pacifica leaned forward and opened the glove compartment to reveal two Beretta M9s in black holsters, their black metal glinting in the light of the afternoon sun.

"Want to take a chance with these?" Pacifica asked, giving him a pleading look.

Dipper leaned back in his chair, thinking over Pacifica's suggestion. "No," Dipper said pointedly, "I want to expose Salvatore, not take hostages in my mother's restaurant. Waiving guns around and scaring people is not going to make them more amenable to what we have to say when the time comes."

"Hey!" Pacifica said. "I don't like it either. But we know the Epicurean Club is going to have security on the entrances later to prevent anyone from leaving with samples of the pate. We don't know if they're going to be armed or with what; and we may have to hold a gun on Salvatore if things go really bad."

"The fabric of our clothes isn't thick enough to hide the outline of these guns," Dipper said. "One of our co-workers will see, and we're going to have a hell of a time justifying this." Dipper sighed. "No, for our part in the operation, we can't afford to use weapons. If we pull guns in there, we'll essentially be forced to hold the place up. We'll lose our argument against Salvatore automatically, not to mention that we'll likely end up in jail, even if Wendy and Mabel manage to pull off the attack and expose Salvatore for who and what he really is."

Pacifica reluctantly sighed, closing the glove compartment door. "You're right."

Dipper reached forward and took her hand in his. "Hey. It'll be fine. Let's keep our eye on the ball, and support each other, and whatever happens, happens. And know that, no matter what happens in there, I'll always love you…Pacifica Pines."

Pacifica leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his lips. "I know. Let's go inside."

The two of them entered to find the evening wait staff, most of whom he went to school, engaged in a flurry of activity: cleaning tables, vacuuming, and setting up white lace table settings far fancier than what Jennifer Pines normally had in her restaurant. The red upholstered booths lining the windows were being cleaned, and the restaurant's burgundy red carpet was being diligently vacuumed.

Dipper scanned the room, and saw his mom standing next to the kitchen doorway, overseeing the preparations, with the same beaming smile on her face that was one of him and his sister's earliest memories.

Dipper gave a pained sigh. And here he was, having to put at risk the dream his mom worked and struggled her entire life for.

But what choice did he have? If he let his mom have this night, she'd find out what had happened and she'd never forgive him. His mom was not a Northwest, and neither was he, she knew and understood that some things had too high a price.

 _The one thing you can't trade for your heart's_  desire, she'd once told him and Mabel,  _is your heart._

His mom caught his eye and smiled. "Dipper," she said as she walked over to him. "Pacifica, what do you think?"

Dipper struggled to control the urge to blurt out what Salvatore was doing. "It's great, Mom," he said aloud, hoping the note of nervousness on his voice didn't show.

"Yeah," Pacifica said, a wide smile on her face hiding her own nervousness. "It's great, Misses Pines."

Jennifer Pines smirked. "Relax, guys, it'll be fine. The dinner service will go fine." Her tone belied the obvious nervousness in her voice.

"What do you need us to do?"

"Well," his mom said, shaking herself slightly. "You know that big oak table we have in the back?"

Dipper nodded. He knew what it was. It had, in fact, been two hundred years old and been in the Pines side of his family for roughly that long.

"I want to use it for Salvatore and his top chefs when they arrive. Could you and Pacifica get Rachel and Mark to help you bring it out and set it up?"

Dipper nodded. "You got it."

"Thank you," she said, impulsively hugging him to her. Dipper, terrified of what was going to have to happen in the next few hours, impulsively hugged her back.

As Dipper held his mother to him, he heard the door chime, an electronic two-tone beeping. In keeping with the rustic, British-Irish countryside aesthetic, it had originally been an actual physical bell…until Paz broke down and had a flashback the first time she walked through the door. His mom ordered it replaced that day.

"Speak of the devil," she said, surprised.

Dipper's eyes widened as he disentangled himself and turned around to view, stepping into the dining area, Thomas Salvatore.  _You have no idea how accurate that idiom is today, Mom._

As his mom walked up and greeted him, he found himself rooted to his spot, studying the man he'd been struggling against in secret for weeks. Looking at a four year old picture was one thing, seeing that man in the flesh was quite another. He seemed ordinary enough. He was his height, somewhat thinner build, but with an angular face, that, with only four years between that photo and today, was untouched by age.

It was the eyes that got to him. Anyone else that lacked his experiences with Preston Northwest could be forgiven for mistaking the gleam in his eyes purely for keen intellect. And while that was unquestionably there, there was more than a hint of the type of suave, predatory glint he'd seen all too often in that bastard's eyes.

His mom turned back to Dipper and gestured him forward.

"And this is my son, Aidan," she said. "Who usually prefers to go by his nickname Dipper. If you need anything at all, and I'm not there, talk to him."

Salvatore smiled at him, and Dipper fought the disturbed tingling that tickled his shoulder blades. "Of course," he said, holding his hand out. "It's nice to meet you, Mister Pines."

For a moment, Dipper stood there, disgusted at the very thought of touching his hands. The awkward silence grew longer and the look on his mother's face grew more and more irritated when he felt Pacifica touch his shoulder. Dipper jolted, and reached out to take the proffered hand firmly.

"It's nice to meet you too, sir," he lied smoothly. "Sorry, I spaced out for a minute."

"I understand," Salvatore said sunnily. "I do that occasionally myself."

The door chimed again as it opened once more. Dipper's eyes widened again, his hands jerking instinctively for the sidearm he'd nixed only minutes before. The sidearm he'd worn whenever he was with his men the last couple weeks and the one he wished he had now.

Sauntering confidently into the restaurant, dressed in sharp, clean tuxedos, were eight men. They were led by a hugely muscled dark-skinned man with brown eyes, who looked like he could break a man's jaw with one punch.

"This is Victor Brown," Salvatore said airily. "He'll be heading up our security forces. Their main job is keeping our pate recipe out of the wrong hands at our exclusive services." Dipper could just hear the words keep the riff-raff out.

Brown caught his gaze and gave a flippant cock of his head. His meaning was clear. Interfere, and they'd carry out the kill order on Pacifica.

His mom cocked his head curiously, obviously wondering why such a show of force was necessary to keep a liver pate recipe out of the hands of competitors.

"Of course," she said, fighting to keep the unease out of her voice as she shook their hands.

"Mister Brown, Mister Martinez," he said, "take your positions please." As they moved towards the front and back entrances, he turned back to his mom. "Please, Chef Pines, show me your kitchen."

"Of course," she said, nodding and gesturing with her hand. "Right this way."

Then they were gone, disappeared into the back.

Dipper looked at Pacifica and saw the same alarmed expression he wore reflected back. Neither had to say what they were both thinking.

_Great, when we back him into a corner, he could have his people take the entire restaurant hostage._

On the one hand, it'd finish the job of destroying his credibility. On the other, the lives of everyone in that restaurant were now at risk.

"Now do you wish we had those guns?" Paz whispered in a flinty voice.

Dipper could only nod as he watched the enemy take watch positions in the parking lot, cutting them off from his truck, and their only weapons.

_1530 PDT_

Dipper Pines stood in the loading dock, butterflies in his stomach as he, Pacifica, Rachel Chen and Mark Foraker watched as the loading dock door opened to reveal the back end of a white van. On the back, emblazoned in dark red letters, were the words, one above the other, Briarwood Farm.

Dipper sighed as the driver's side door opened and a fair-skinned man with black hair stepped out. Noticing them, he said, "Which one of you signs for this?"

Dipper raised his hand, fighting to keep the disgust and unease off of his face. "I do."

The delivery driver handed him the tablet. "Sign here, please."

Dipper nodded and signed with his legal name, Aidan Pines before handing the tablet back to him.

"Thank you, sir," he said courteously before returning to the van.

Dipper sighed. "All right, guys, let's get to work."

Dipper and Pacifica opened the back of the van, and his heart almost stopped beating in his chest. Stacked from the floor to the ceiling was box after box bearing the words in pitch black "QTY 5 Containers Liver Pate."

Dipper felt his gorge rise in her throat, and he had to fight down the urge to vomit. This wasn't food. This was evidence of the kidnapping and murder of children.

He felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up to see Pacifica, giving him a look. It was a look that seemed to simultaneously give of her strength while begging him for some of his own.

Dipper wrapped her hand around Pacifica's wrist and pulled it gently off her shoulder, pressing a soft kiss to it. He knew that Chen and Foraker wouldn't wonder why. Everyone in the restaurant knew that they were a couple, and little displays of affection between them were par for the course.

"Let's get all this squared away," Dipper said aloud, hoping his disgust didn't show on his voice, as he reached for the first box.

Fifteen minutes later, an exhausted and heartsick Dipper Pines closed the doors to the back of the freezer van before rapping hard on the door and stepping back.

The van's engine revved up. And a moment later, the Briarwood van pulled out of the loading dock, weaved it's way out of the parking lot and got back on the road, headed north.

As Dipper pressed the button that closed the loading bay door, he crossed his arms. Over the whir of the door's hydraulics, he wondered if the delivery driver at Briarwood knew what was going on.  _He almost certainly does_ , he thought.  _If they pick up their vile pate from Briarwood directly,_  no one  _could fail to pick up the vile scent that Mabel and Wendy reported._

He checked the time on his phone. 4:15. In another seventy-five minutes, Wendy and Mabel would depart with everyone else for Briarwood. No later than 8:30, they'd commence their attack. And he and Pacifica would openly confront Salvatore.

He sighed anxiously and began to pace, thinking about the wildcards that had shown up. The reasons they had for sending off literally everyone else to attack Briarwood had been twofold. The first one being that, since they had no idea of the size, strength, or armaments of the Briarwood garrison, and since saving those kids was the absolute number one priority, ensuring that they had the best chance to do so had to come first. The second reason was that they were operating under the assumption that the security force that they knew Salvatore would have wasn't going to be much a threat. The assumption, logical at the time, was that the security force would be more…genteel for lack of a better term. That the "snatchers" who grabbed children were one branch, and the people who prevented samples of that pate from being removed from the restaurants were another. The people who joined the Epicurean Club were another, calmer, less trained or experienced in the ways of violence; and when push came to shove, would be just as horrified as any sane person would be and side with them. Obviating the need for any sort of armed backup on call when the shit hit the fan.

The appearance of Killbone and Scarhead at the restaurant threw that assumption out the window. The security force was armed, violent, and experienced in combat. Even worse, they'd fought at the Siege, on the wrong side. They knew that if captured they'd likely end up being charged with treason, in addition, to their culpability in what they'd been up to working for Salvatore. Ending up on death row was practically a given.

With this new mix of factors, he didn't know what was going to happen. They could take the entire restaurant hostage. They could gun down everyone they could and run. Anything. Salvatore and his inner circle would be exposed and on the run from the law, but a lot of people could very well end up dead in the process.

Nothing for it, though, they have to proceed as planned, and try to deal with the consequences as they come.

"I take it my van has gone," a male voice asked from behind him. Icy fingers trickled down his spine as Dipper wheeled around to see Salvatore standing in the doorway, a satisfied smile on his face.

Dipper fought to control his breathing. Logically, he knew it made no sense for Salvatore to off him in this situation; there were a dozen witnesses who would have seen him go off into the loading area for one. But that didn't stop him from being afraid of being alone in a room with a man who kidnapped children and harvested their livers for pate.

"Yes, sir," he said, clutching his arms around himself reflexively. "Your van has left."

"Good," Salvatore said in his cultured, soft-spoken voice. "And everything is put away?"

"Yes, sir," Dipper said with a wooden smile on his face, "it's all put away."

Salvatore nodded. "Good." He gestured towards him. "I see you have a ring on your finger? You're married?"

"Engaged."

He smiled, a slick smile that made him feel dirty. "Am I correct in assuming that the lucky lady is the young blonde woman I saw standing next to you?"

"You assume correctly," Dipper said, his voice going stony.

"I congratulate you, young man," he said airily. "She seems quite a catch, and I hope nothing happens that prevents the two of you from having a long, happy life together."

The smile on Dipper's face disappeared as he took Salvatore's warning for what it was. "I hope so too," he said stonily, admirably holding back the fear that roiled in his gut at the thought of losing Pacifica this time. "Because if something  _were_  to happen to my fiancée, and it was in fact a result of malice aforethought, I would find the person or persons responsible. And I would make these persons answer for what they'd done. And by the time I'm done, while their body or bodies may one day be found, they could never be identified from what remains. And my fiancée would do the same thing for me."  _You can kill one of us, you bastard,_  he thought, as he met his gaze,  _but you won't live long enough to regret it._

Salvatore's eyes widened as Salvatore took Dipper's warning for what it was. "Well," he said, "let us trust that nothing happens."

"Yes," Dipper said, stonily. "Let's."

Salvatore nodded and walked out of the loading bay, disappearing back into the front of the kitchen. A heartbeat later, Pacifica stuck her head into the room from the storage room to the left of the loading bay door. She had a relieved look on her face as she entered the room, her right hand coming out from behind her back to reveal a serrated bread knife that she promptly dropped. She closed the gap between the two of them. Dipper's arms outstretched instinctively as Pacifica threw himself into her embrace.

"God, Dipper," she said softly, as Dipper wrapped himself around her. "I thought he was going to-"

"I know," Dipper said softly as he held his fiancée to him. "Good thinking with the knife."

"Hey," Pacifica said, leaning out of his embrace just enough to look him dead in the eyes. "I would never let anything happen to you."

He kissed her. Hard. Pacifica leaned desperately into his kiss.

After a minute, he broke the kiss, putting his hand on her face. "Four hours," Dipper whispered, "four hours before everyone has to make their move and things have just gotten a lot more unpredictable around here."

"No plan of battle survives first contact with the enemy and you know it," Pacifica whispered back. "Really though, we should have thought of it. We know they knew we were on to them, did we really think that, today of all days he wouldn't have least have some insurance against us making any sort of move to expose him?" Her voice hardened, "and we certainly needed those guns we can't get to now."

"I know," Dipper said, swallowing a lump in his throat. "All we have to do now is, hope for the best."

* * *

_1950 PDT_

Mabel Pines sat in the passenger seat of the van Robbie was driving. She looked over at the rolling Central Valley farmland as she fought down the butterflies in her stomach. She wanted to be able to say she was just being silly. This was far from her first time going into combat. Indeed, combat, in one form or another, defined her time in Gravity Falls. Especially at the end.

This was different, however. Prior to the Siege she never gone into a situation seriously intending to kill. Even during the Siege, she was forced to kill to keep the enemy out of her home, and to help protect the remaining Marines holding the house. Tonight, she was actively planning to go into a location and kill and help others kill other human beings.

She didn't think it was murder per se, there'd always been a distinction between killing and murder. Murder was either illegal or unjustified, usually both. While she knew what she was about to do was illegal, there was absolutely no doubt in her mind that it was justified.

Still though, she had to stop thinking about it, so she said the first non-combat related thing that came to her mind.

"So," she said, trying to sound as calm as possible. "How are things with you and Tambry?"

"Huh?" Robbie said, leaning forward and clicking on the headlights.

"How are things between you and Tambry?"

"Oh," Robbie said, "They're going great. Really great." He sighed. "God, I hope they're okay."

Mabel nodded, smiling despite herself, happy for her friend. As much as he wanted to pat herself on the back, though, in the years since her encounter with the Love God, she'd been forced to reassess just how much of Robbie's relationship with Tambry was the effect of the Love Potion.

As much as he and Tambry had bickered during that first meeting, she'd realized that they hadn't really been as contemptuous and dismissive of each other as they'd acted. Either one of them could have stormed out of that first meeting, but they didn't. They'd stayed even as they'd traded insults with one another, and would have eaten the chili fries she'd spiked with potion. And as she'd once heard it put, "God couldn't give anyone anything they didn't already possess." She'd been forced to come to the conclusion that Robbie and Tambry were always likely to end up together, and she'd just forced them to recognize feelings for each other that already existed.

"Hey," Mabel said, registering what Robbie had just said, "the others will be fine, including Tambry."

"It's just-" Robbie said, sighing angrily. "I'm terrified about something happening to Tambry, to all of them."

"I am too," Mabel said patiently. "It gets even worse when you're soulmate is on the line."

"That's just it, Mabes," Robbie said, "As much as I like Wendy, Tambry is my soulmate, and I suppose I always knew it. I came to Gravity Falls with my family from Astoria when I was five. Do you know who the first person I met was?"

"Tambry?"

"Yeah," Robbie said, sighing. "Then as we grew older, we kind of grew apart. And the way I met Wendy during that period kind of colored my perceptions of her."

"How did you meet Wendy, anyway?"

"She knocked one of my front teeth out at my birthday party," Robbie said, "all the kids in the area had been invited."

Mabel chuckled. "Damn, Robbie," she said shaking her head. "You have an…interesting taste in women."

Robbie chuckled. "Yeah, I guess I do. And I  _was_  in love with Wendy. At one point."

"At one point," Mabel said pointedly. "But it wasn't when you were trying to brainwash her with music. That was  _not_  an act of love, under any circumstances."

"I know, damn it," Robbie said, turning to face her, eyes glinting with tears. "I know. I've known for years."

She thought back to her own questionable actions. She'd sworn to help her brother crack the laptop's password, and instead of fulfilling her obligations to her own kin, her best friend, she'd let herself get caught up in a ridiculous crush on a blonde creep obsessed with puppets. In doing so, she'd left him open to demonic possession and left humankind open to extinction when Bill Cipher attempted to get his hand on the Third Journal.

And while letting the portal complete it's cycle had ultimately turned out to be the right call that brought her grandfather home, she had still been forced to betray her brother once again. The second was understandable given the pressure she was under, the first had been inexcusable.

And Robbie had, for one brief moment, emulated Gideon in his desire to be with Wendy.

"Nothing I have done since I betrayed my brother can make up for what I let happen and what would have happened had I not acted," Mabel said softly. "Somewhere deep inside you, you knew it was wrong. A voice you did not listen to pleaded with you to stop. You convinced yourself that it wasn't a big deal, that 'all was fair in love and war. ' After all, if you want something, it must be more important than what anyone else wants. You wanted to possess someone so much, you learned to shut out the voice telling you that you were going too far."

"I had a choice about making that CD," Robbie said glumly. Part of Robbie's family descended from Cayuse shamans that had dealt with Bill Cipher, and in his desire to keep Wendy he had abused that knowledge.

"Yes, you did," Mabel responded.

"I knew it was wrong and did it anyway."

"And yet, here we are."

"Here we are," Robbie said. "And I've never been able to forgive myself."

"Let's be clear about this, Robert Valentino," Mabel said pointedly, her harshness directed as much as herself as at him. "You never will! You hurt Wendy, and did so by creating and using a technique that could very easily harm thousands of others, millions of others. You know who else was that willing to do that, don't you?"

"I know," Robbie responded with a ragged sigh. "I know. But if I do remind you of Gideon, why did you-?"

"Why did I help you?" Mabel finished. "Because, unlike Gideon, you knew you'd gone too far; I could see it in your eyes that day in the graveyard. Because you did at one point genuinely love Wendy and you knew that you'd crossed a line that should never be crossed is why I helped you - that's why. Despite what you did, I'm proud to consider you my friend." She reached out and touched her friend's shoulder. "And that's why I know I can count on you tonight."

Robbie smiled a wan smile at her, right when the GPS chimed in.

" _You have arrived at your destination_." Mabel looked up to see Wendy's van parked by the side of the road with Wendy and Tambry surrounded by the other five members of their half of the attack force. Judging by the Berettas on their hips and the M4s slung along their backs, they were already fully armed and ready to attack.

Robbie brought the car to a stop along the empty stretch of road as the sun sat in the west.

Mabel was still unbuckling when he realized that Robbie already unbuckled, gotten out of the car and ran over to his girlfriend, who did the same. Robbie enveloped Tambry in his arms and Mabel watched, happy, as her friends kissed.

"Mabel," Wendy said, walking over to her, a relieved smile on her face. "How was the drive?"

"Good," Mabel said, nodding. "No incidents. You?"

Wendy cocked her head to the side. "A few close calls. Nate and Genevieve were on the police scanners. They managed to route us away from any patrol units that would have stopped us."

"Good," Mabel said feelingly. "I can't imagine having to attack that place with half strength."

"Me neither. Now I suggest you and your half of the team arm up." Wendy checked her watch. "We absolutely have to attack in the next half hour."

Mabel nodded, sighing, saying a silent prayer that his brother and future sister-in-law would survive carrying out their end of the mission.

Mabel walked around and opened the back door to reveal, Candy, Thompson, Vivian, her boyfriend Oscar, and Melanie Ocampo.

All looking at her expectantly.

"All right boys and girls," she said, "The show's about to start, so get tactical. Were about to have all the fight we can handle in the next half hour."

 _Dipper, Paz_ , she thought to herself as she opened up a crate and pulled out her M4.  _I don't know what's going to happen, but whatever happens, good luck. And God bless._

* * *

_2020 PDT_

Pacifica Pines stood in the hallway, leaning against the wall between the two bathrooms. She thought back to the previous night, if only to put off, even for a few more moments, what she had to do next. Her Dipper, her marvelous, lusty Dipper, had been in top form that night as the bonfire raged behind them. Almost four years as a couple meant they knew exactly how the other liked it, and Dipper had (as ever) been relentless and thorough in that regard.

And, there was an undeniable spice to doing the deed with Dipper while the paintings that had been metonymic of her family's cruelty burned to ashes and embers behind them. Her father talked about finding the "right person" for her (i.e. someone who was both wealthy and with psychopathic tendancies, by no means necessarily linked but if you looked hard enough you could find examples of anything) and the thought of his "precious daughter" being "despoiled" by "riff-raff" must have had him stewing in his prison cell while alive and spinning in his grave in death.

That is, if he'd had a grave. Within an hour of his confirmed execution, Preston Northwest was cremated, flown out to the USS  _Ronald Reagan_  and dumped in international waters.

Good riddance.

She picked herself up off the wall, checking the time on her watch. It was 8:25. Time to clean up the mess he left behind.

The bathroom door opened behind her and she turned around to view Dipper coming out of the bathroom, face glistening from where he'd been splashing water on it.

"You ready for this?" Pacifica asks, fighting down the butterflies that were fluttering in her stomach.

Dipper shot her a wan smile, which she saw right through of course; he was just as scared as she was. "Yeah, I am. Are you?"

Paz sighed. "As ready as I'll ever be."

Dipper nodded. "I don't know what's going to happen in the next few minutes but-,"

"But no matter what," she finished for him, walking over and putting her fingertips on his lips. "I'll love you to my dying breath. You will always,  _always_  be my Dipper."

Dipper stared at her, mouth wide before he closed it with an audible pop. He took her wrist gently and pressed a soft kiss to it.

"Let's do this."

A beaming Jennifer Pines sat at the heavy wooden table, Thomas Salvatore sitting at her left hand. She looked out over the table, fighting back tears. All her life she wanted to be a chef. When she was a little girl she'd pretend to be cooking with a ladle and a bowl full of hair ties, which her parents had thought was cute, but they'd eventually realized that this wasn't just a child's fancy. The daughter of a maid and a bartender, she hadn't exactly been wealthy, and paying for culinary school hadn't been cheap. They'd saved what they could, but she'd still been forced to take full loans and grants in order to move to New York for her education.

She'd gone there, and succeeded. She'd come home, and in the process of working her first chef's job out of culinary school, reconnected with and eventually married her high school sweetheart David Pines, a medical student out of UCSF. And she'd been able to get enough clout to convince a bank to give her a restaurant loan.

And she made enough money to start paying back not only that loan, but the student loans she already owed, and to help provide for her newborn son and daughter.

But her dream of owning a chain of restaurants had foundered in California's…less than stable economy. California had and has been losing population and capital to Texas, Nevada, and Arizona for years and more than once she'd considered joining the flight.

Two things kept them from doing it. The Bay Area was her home, where she'd grown up, and because she didn't have the heart to separate her son from the girl he'd met in Gravity Falls whom he obviously loved.

Other parents would have dismissed it as youthful infatuation, and not "real love," moved away, and given their kid some spiel about how "he (or she) would meet someone else eventually" and left it at that. But she had first fallen in love with David herself when she was thirteen, and as such, refused to dismiss, as her parents had done, her son's feelings as teenage infatuation that would end by itself eventually. While that had always been a risk, it wasn't a risk that went away with age. And because she refused to sacrifice her son's future happiness just to give herself a better of chance of expanding her business, they'd stayed, even if it meant sacrificing that part of her dream forever.

So they'd stayed, and now, at last, that decision, which she'd made because she loved her son, was paying dividends (though she would have made it anyway, regardless). With the wealth, profits, and clout of the Epicurean Club members coming in, not only would her workers would have more money, but she'd at last have a chance to expand her business without breaking her son's heart.

"And now," Chef Salvatore said, standing up. "It's time to serve up the crowning jewel of our unique food, a liver pate that has received rave reviews from everyone who's tasted it."

"You're right, you mangy sonofabitch," a familiar male voice lashed out over the assembled dinner crowd. She wheeled around in shock to see behind her to see Dipper and Pacifica walking out of the back, eyes blazing, malice in every line. "It  _has_  received rave reviews. But that's only because no one knows what it's actually made of. If they did, they'd be horrified."

"Dipper," she whispered furtively, flooded with anger. "What the hell are you doing?"

Dipper's face contorted in hateful rage as he jabbed a finger in Salvatore's face. "Mom, you don't know the half of what the people sitting at this table have been doing!"

"What are you talking about?" she said darkly.

She felt Salvatore's hand on her shoulder and she looked over to see him with a conciliatory, unconcerned smile on her face. "Go ahead," he said in his richly cultured tones, as he stood up. "Say what you want to say. I don't have anything to hide."

* * *

Dipper turned to face the well-dressed crowd, resplendent in fine clothes and fancy jewelry looking at them askance from the regular tables. "You've been lied to. All of you have. That liver pate you're all so fond of, wasn't made using geese like a normal high class pate would. It wasn't made from any animal at all." He rounded back on Dipper, anger and tears in her eyes. "It was made from human livers. The livers of children. Our children. Children who've been kidnapped off the streets of our cities! Condemned to be chained up in cages in their own shit and piss while they're force-fed. You, all of you, have partaken in the liver of a kidnapped child. "

Dipper turned back "Isn't that right, Thomas? Or should I say Tomas? That is the name you own Briarwood under, isn't it? When you bought it from the Northwests?"

He heard muttering behind him, mostly of the "oh great, another crackpot conspiracy theory" variety. He'd expected that. Events like the Siege usually spawned conspiracy theories about the actors, state and non-state, involved.

"These aren't the ravings of a delusional crackpot," he heard Pacifica cut in fiercely behind him. He turned around to view her pulling a photo out of her pocket, the photo of Thomas Salvatore at the Northwest Fest group photograph as she walked unflinchingly over to Salvatore. "This is you, isn't it? At Northwest Fest?"

"How did you get your hands on that?"

Pacifica gave him a look absolutely dripping with condescension, "Oh, come now, a smart guy like you? You should be able to figure it out no problem," right before making this cheeky clicking sound with her tongue.

 _Don't overplay your hand, hon_ , Dipper thought to himself, images of Dipper lashing out and punching Pacifica in the neck playing in his head.

He glared at her for several seconds before recognition dawned in her eyes. "You're Pacifica? Preston's daughter. Fine, I was at Northwest Fest. So were a lot of people. I would remind you that guilt by association is a logical fallacy."

"Oh, we have a lot more than just 'association' to go on," Dipper said as he walked over, ignoring the mortified glare in his mother's eyes to stand next to Pacifica. "We have your records of your associations with Preston Northwest, your original Culinary Institute of America transcripts, not the fake ones you've been using to bullshit everyone, and information that gives lie to your hype about your original restaurants. For starters, you didn't graduate in the top ten percent of your class, you were at best a C student."

Salvatore's eyes flashed. "That's a lie," he said darkly. "I graduated salutatorian."

"You didn't even make the top ten," Dipper responded contemptuously. "No wonder the food you cooked on your own sucked and your first two restaurants collapsed under their dead weight."

Salvatore glared at them both taking sharp, heaving breaths. "Oh?" Paz said from next to him. "That-that doesn't piss you off? It did twenty years ago, when you were wailing on that reviewer for the  _San Francisco Chronicle_  in broad daylight in the Mission District. If it weren't for Preston making those disorderly conduct and assault charges go away, the bank wouldn't have loaned you forty cents!"

"To let the Bay Area forget about you for a while you decided to explore the world," Dipper said darkly. "It was in the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia where you first heard the Polynesian term 'long pig.' When you discovered that cannibalism had died out in the Marquesas, you left for Indonesian New Guinea, to the one people in the world that still practiced some form of cannibalism at the time. And you took what you discovered there, and expanded it into something that even the Korowai, who only traditionally practiced cannibalism in very specific, very ritualistic circumstances, would find revolting. And  _you_ , Salvatore, are revolting."

Salvatore tore out of his chair. "Bullshit!" He screamed at the top of his lungs.

The room suddenly became very, very quiet. He looked out over them. The "regular" Epicurean Club members were staring at them with more than a touch of horror, his mother looked scared, and Salvatore's inner circle looked guilty as hell.  _Gotcha_ , he thought.

"Touched a nerve, did I?" He said aloud. "'The lady doth protest too much, methinks?' Oh, and we're not just going off association here, my sister snuck into Briarwood,  _saw_  what you've been doing. My trust in her is marrow-deep."

Light exploded in front of Dipper's eyes as he stumbled backwards towards the floor only to be steadied by Pacifica grabbing his hand and propping him back up.

Salvatore, eyes blazing, fist still balled from where he'd punched him, bit out, "Then your sister is a lying bitch!"

Dipper heard his mother's chair scrape on the carpet. "My daughter," he heard his mother say, eyes blazing with disgust and with a voice like ice, "wouldn't lie about something like this."

"No," Dipper said, "she wouldn't. We couldn't get the police or the FBI to take our allegations seriously, so Mabel and others are dealing with the place on their own."

"What?" His mom said flatly from next to him.

"We'll explain later," he said quickly. "By the end of the night, all the children still alive at your little death camp will be on their to Sacramento area hospitals. And you will be on your way to a jail cell. Mister Salvatore, you and your inner circle are done. Your club, I don't think, supports you anymore. Why don't you and your friends be good little psychopaths and sit and wait quietly for the police  _I'm sure someone in this restaurant is calling right now!_ "

"Oh," a woman with strawberry-blonde hair said from the regular dining tables as she pulled out her iPhone. "Right, sorry."

Dipper saw a glint out of the corner of his eye. He wheeled around, and everything seemed to turn to slow motion. The woman, dialing 911 on her phone…and Killbone pulling a Beretta out of his pocket and aiming it at her through the plate glass window.

"Get down!" He shouted as he bounded over the table and bolted, hunched over, for the woman. The woman and her party's flight-or-fight instincts had been in decent form, however, as they, and Dipper, instinctively dove for the floor right as the plate glass exploded.

The world sped up at the sounds of people screaming, and glass shattering, and the blasts of firing handguns.

Dipper, calculating firing angles in his head, and hoping that Tambry's efforts to teach all of them  _Krav Maga_  were about to pay off, yanked himself out from under the table, and dove out onto the sidewalk, among the shooters.

Contrary to the way the way the martial arts were portrayed in movies, where fighters landed multiple strikes on each other throughout the course of a single fight, in the real-world, the first strike to get through unblocked almost invariably led to the death or maiming of the person impacted.

Dipper's whip kick slammed his steel-toed shoe with all his strength straight into one of the shooter's, a fair-skinned man with blonde hair, solar plexus. Abruptly all fire from his gun ceased even as Dipper charged Killbone, leaving the first man he hit to die as his lungs forgot to breathe and his heart forgot to beat.

Killbone was still trying to adapt to what was going on when Dipper's left hand tightened like vice around his gun hand's wrist even as his right fist slammed hard into the gun hand of the person right next to Killbone, fracturing his wrist, damaging the nerve and sending his own gun clattering to the pavement.

Killbone's guttural yell of pain was cut off by Dipper punching him in hard in the nose and driving his hard, bony kneecap into his wrist.

"That," he bit out darkly, "Is for threatening Pacifica. And you're lucky I don't tear your head off and piss down it!"

The huge thug roared and yanked himself off the ground, his left hand lashing out for Dipper's neck.

Without missing a beat, Dipper's foot slammed into his testicles. Killbone doubled over, exposing the base of his neck to his knifehand strike.

Dipper turned away from the unconscious (or dead) thug and looked back inside the restaurant.

The heavy wooden table had been flipped over in the melee and throughout the front of the house knots of Epicurean Club members and Ox and Lamb wait staff were busy pinning members of the inner circle to the ground against their flailing struggles and screamed invective.

He scanned the crowd desperately, looking for either his mother or his girlfriend. Finally he saw his mom, standing in front of the bathroom hallway, utter shock in her wide eyes at the war zone her restaurant had become in the space of only a few short minutes.

"Mom!" He shouted, pushing through the crowd, "Mom, are you okay?!"

His mom jolted as though struck and looked at him, the ongoing struggle to comprehend what was going on still on her face. "I'm fine, Dipper," she said before he felt her hand on his shoulder and enveloped in her arms.

"Are you okay?" She asked into his shoulder.

Dipper gently extricated himself from his mom's hug and looked her in the eyes. "I'm fine, mom. Mom, where's my girlfriend? Where's Pacifica?"

She gestured halfheartedly to the kitchen. "She said that some of the thugs were stationed out back, and she didn't want them to outflank us."

Dipper gave an irritated sigh, having forgot about them while fighting the attack on the front of the house.  _Good thinking, babe_. He cast about for some sort of weapon and found an IMI Desert Eagle that had been dropped on the ground during the fight. He picked it up, checked that it was fully loaded and ran into the back.

The kitchen was a mess as Dipper cautiously paced through it, gun in hand. The floor was covered in meat, soup, and vegetables as everyone had abandoned their stations and either taken cover or run to help in the fighting in the front of the house.

"Pacifica!" Dipper called as he moved through the kitchens and into the storerooms. "Pacifica!"

He finally found her in the loading dock, and his heart sank. Pacifica was curled into a ball in the corner on the floor, the front of her uniform stained even darker with blood. Three of Salvatore's thugs were down. The rest were being pinned by the kitchen staff against the wall.

One of the dead thugs, he realized, was Scarhead. He was lying in the middle of the floor, a serrated bread knife sticking out of his neck.

Dipper's eyes darted from Scarhead's lifeless body to Pacifica and back again as his brain pieced together what happened.

Dipper was by her side in an instant. "Pacifica," he whispered, placing his arms gently on her shoulder. "Baby, are you okay?"

Pacifica continued her thousand-yard stare at Martinez's corpse.

"Pacifica!" He said louder, and she looks up at him. She mouthed something wordlessly at him before her arm came around his back and pulled her into a hug as she sobbed uncontrollably into her shoulder.

He was still holding her, sobbing, in his arms, as the wail of police and ambulance sirens grew louder in the distance.


	9. A New Day

"O hurry to the ragged wood, for there  
I will drive all those lovers out and cry—  
O my share of the world, O yellow hair!  
No one has ever loved but you and I."

-William Butler Yeats,  _The Ragged Wood_

Chapter Nine

A New Day

 _"And we continue our live coverage of the shocking and heartbreaking story that broke in California two days ago,_ " the anchorwoman on the office television said in her steady, even tones that all news anchors stuck too by training, regardless of how revolted they must have felt. The screen switched over to a feed of Briarwood from last night. The area surrounding the Briarwood farmhouse was surrounded by what it seemed were dozens of police vehicles and ambulances. " _The number of children pulled out of Briarwood alive stands at nearly three hundred and twenty-five, including Jessica Ocampo"._  The photo of Jessica that flashed on the screen was the one provided by her family to the FBI, " _the twelve-year old-girl from Oakland, who's kidnapping and apparent murder sent shockwaves through the region. Her, and hundreds of other children between the ages of seven and twelve were kept in shocking and inhumane conditions, were bound and naked in their own excrement, attached to feeding tubes apparently designed to fatten them up to be eaten. Miss Ocampo is currently at the University of California- Davis, Medical Center in stable condition after undergoing surgery to treat the muscles injured during her confinement. Even more horrifying is that preliminary investigations have shown indications of a mass grave, where it is likely more children who didn't survive were buried_."

The TV abruptly shut off, and the business suited woman, who seemed to thirtyish with dark-haired with brown eyes that had epicanthic folds slanting her eyes upward just slightly, leaned back in her chair, and appraised them coolly. Dipper felt the keen intelligence in her dark eyes, along with Wendy, Mabel, and Pacifica.

"Well, Mister Pines," Special Agent-in-Charge Imogene Tsang of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's San Francisco Field Office said. "You've put us in quite a pickle. On the one hand, what happened at Briarwood…beggars the imagination. The fact that people could be so…morally and ethically bankrupt to use human children for food is something I never thought I'd see, and I've been in the FBI for fifteen years. And as a mother myself, I'm glad someone put an end to it.

"On the other end, you've broken multiple state and federal laws yourselves, you realize that don't you?"

"Ma'am," Dipper said, from where he'd been standing at parade rest, but he couldn't keep the bite out of his voice, "in my defense, both your office, the FBI field office in Sacramento, and the state and local law enforcement agencies in the jurisdictions in question explicitly rejected our allegations as, what did your agent downstairs put it, 'the delusions of some stoned teenagers?'"

Special Agent Tsang leaned back in her chair. "I know. For that and that alone is why you, Miss Corduroy, Miss Pines, and Miss Northwest are here and not in the Santa Rita Jail along with Salvatore and his cohorts."

"Why are we here, ma'am?" Mabel, in her own pink and black business suit, the most formal clothes she owned, asked from her left, "if the District Attorney. or the United States Attorney's office wanted to charge us, we'd be in Dublin right now, siting in Santa Rita. So why are we here?"

"Because regardless of the legality of your actions, you did expose and put a stop to an atrocity without parallel in American history," she said evenly. "It'd be a piss poor way of rewarding you for that by sending you to jail, particularly because it'd look like the only reason we were doing it was because you made us look like idiots. In all honesty, I'm more likely to survive a fall from the top of this building then actually get a jury in this country to convict any of you for anything…And because the federal government has a proposal for you." She motioned to the door behind her. "The people with that proposal are in the conference room."

Dipper looked at the women to either side. Wendy and Pacifica looked…anxious to say the least. He held Pacifica's gaze a moment longer, as though searching her for any sign of the hurt and pain he'd seen in her eyes that terrible night, when she'd tossed and turned, screaming and shaking like a leaf in his arms.

He'd been terrified of what was happening, but his father told him that, counterintuitively, it was a good thing.

"It means she's bent, not broken," he'd said, "it means there's good odds she can be bought back from the edge she almost went over that night."

"My woman's a fighter," Dipper had responded fiercely. "If anyone can get through this, she can."

Not that he didn't plan on throwing her over his shoulder and carrying her bodily to the nearest psychiatrist as soon as they were out of the site of the building, if that was what it took to actually get her in front of one.

This whole thought process took less than three seconds and, the four of them turned and walked towards the conference room door.

"Oh," Tsang said from behind them, and he looked to see her giving them a respectful look. "For what it's worth, you and your people performed superbly. You should be proud."

Dipper, looking at his sister and his friends at the unabashed pride, and absolute trust, on their faces, couldn't help but smile back.

"I am proud," he said, turning back to face her. "Proud of all of them."

Chen smiled at him. "Good luck, Mister Pines. To all of you."

Dipper smiled, turned, and opened the conference room door. And immediately, the smile on his face was transmuted to a look of shock.

In the brightly lit, sun-drenched conference room, the San Francisco skyline glittering behind them, were Agents Johnathan Power and Maxwell Trigger.

"Ah," Agent Power said from behind him. "Close the door."

Dipper, still stunned into silence from the sheer shock of seeing those two again, immediately did as instructed.

"You and your friends have been busy beavers, Mister Pines," Powers said, "taking down a cannibal cult and saving the lives of hundreds of children. It's like your actions up in Oregon only on a smaller scale." He gestured to the chairs. "Have a seat, ladies and gentleman."

Dipper, still taken aback by this turn of events sat down in the seat directly across from Powers, as his friends took their seats on either side of them.

"I'll admit," Dipper said, albeit not entirely truthfully, "I would have preferred to spend my summer working and hanging out with my fiancée."

He could see Pacifica giving him a pointed glare out of the corner of his eye. They all wanted to recapture that sense of accomplishment they'd felt dealing with Bill Cipher once and for all and saving the human race.

Just not like this. Never like this. Not discovering something that made them question whether or not that race was even worth saving.

"Sure," Power said, in a tone that said he didn't believe a word coming out of Dipper's mouth just now. "I'll grant that you didn't want to discover something like this. No sane man or woman wants to discover something like this. But I know you four. You're the type of people who won't be able to stay out of this line of work no matter what. So for the past couple days, we've been working around the clock with the President and Congress to allow you a way to continue operating. "

Dipper, stunned again by this pronouncement, leaned back in his chair. This. This was not what he'd expected at all. He'd had no real idea what to expect but this was not it.

"What are you saying?" He found himself asking, so stunned that it sounded like the words were coming out of someone else's mouth.

"Events here and in Gravity Falls have convinced Congress and the President that something needs to be done. Our government made a mistake years ago, in choosing the wrong person to take over for Quentin Trembley in what was then Oregon Country. Because our ancestors did not think, that decision almost destroyed you, this country, and ultimately this planet."

"No one could have known that," he heard Pacifica say. "Tyler and Congress chose a random person to take over in Gravity Falls. And were promptly distracted by upheavals in the rest of the country. The Democratic-Republicans, the predecessors of today's political parties, split into the Democrats and the Whigs. There was a rebellion in Rhode Island, he failed to establish a boundary between the Oregon Country and what is today British Columbia. There was the ruckus over whether or not to admit Texas to the Union. He had a lot more to deal with than, some random person who, by all logic, should have been incapable of doing anything really dangerous. The next five presidents after him were also too busy trying and failing to process our territorial acquisitions from Mexico  _and_  find a way to keep the country from imploding on Free State-Slave State lines to worrying about a backwoods town in an unincorporated territory disputed with Britain. And by the time Preston Northwest built the Northwest Manor, Lincoln had his hands full dealing with said implosion to notice. No. Whatever Tyler did, the Northwests made their own bed, and lied down in it."

Agent Power appraised her with a look of new respect. "Well said. Regardless, our society is going to be dealing with that mistake for a long time. And we're offering the four of you the chance to take the lead in undoing the damage."

"How?" Dipper asked.

"In the last twelve hours, the President has authorized us to recruit you and your compatriots who assisted in Briarwood, to form the core of a new branch of our own organization. It, like the rest of the Agency. Your mandate, should you choose to accept it, would be twofold. Investigate and deal with any supernatural threats to the United States or our allies, and investigate and deal with any other surprises the Northwests left behind."

Silence reigned in the room for several moments as everyone tried to process what they were saying, looking at them as though they were suffering some sort of mental breakdown.

"You can't be serious," Dipper said pointedly.

"Yes," Power said, "we are. You see, the Special Branch was never intended to deal with the supernatural. Reagan originally envisioned us as a special task force to investigate the signal that we didn't find out until later was part of your grandfather's experiments. We were not ready for what eventually happened. You were. You discovered the clues that were left behind and understood the meaning of them. Consequently, you have more experience dealing with the supernatural than anyone I could possibly come up with the exception of your great-uncles."

"Then why not ask them?" Dipper pointed out.

"Because while they may have the qualifications to deal with the supernatural," Trigger cut in. "They don't have the personal connection, the personal stake, necessary to at least begin to undo the Northwest legacy; you four do."

He looked at his companions. Wendy and Mabel saw the same absolute trust he had in them reflected back at him. They knew that if he declined, they'd go along with his decision…but that they wanted to say yes themselves, wanting to continue to fight the good fight, and take this opportunity to do so. He turned to look at Pacifica, and saw in her eyes, both her absolute trust in him, and her equally absolute desire to tear down the Northwest legacy and all it's works.

And to be honest, it's what he wanted as well. He hadn't really given much thought to the possibility of keeping his little team together. Sure, he'd entertained the idea of them staying together, maybe even going into business together to investigate the supernatural. But they'd been dealing with a depressingly human enemy, and too be honest, he'd been expecting to spend the rest of his life in prison. The fact that not only would they win, but that they would be made an offer like this, hadn't even occurred to him in his dizziest daydreams.

"It's…tempting," Dipper said after a moment. "Only wrinkle in this is that me, Mabel, Paz, and two-thirds of our people are minors."

"We've already taken care of that," Power said, producing a manila folder from his briefcase and sliding it over to them.

In briefcase, were multiple consent forms, signed by the parents of each member of his group that were under the age of eighteen, allowing them to be hired as analysts by the Central Intelligence Agency.

"We've talked to your parents, and told them that we were CIA agents hiring you as analysts, which is not unusual; both us and the CIA hire sixteen and seventeen year olds as analysts routinely. You are of course, not authorized to inform them of the true nature of your work; because if you do sign, you will be intelligence agents and can't divulge anything you learn to them because they don't have a 'need-to-know.'"

"Before we agree to this," Dipper said, "just what are our responsibilities precisely?"

Power leaned back in his chair, "For now, surprisingly lenient. You have to submit reports to either me or Agent Trigger every two weeks, and we will have missions we want you to carry out. But other than that you have full authorization to pursue whatever investigations you wish, the results of which you will have to file written reports on, though you have to go through the FISA courts for warrants. You are also specifically authorized to bring your department up to no greater than two hundred individuals, and you have full control of their hiring, pursuant to background checks."

Dipper looked at him askance. "Despite what we've done," Dipper said softly. "That's an awful lot of power and authority you're giving me."

"I know," Power said, "but, in the case I made to the President, you've amply proven you're up to the responsibility. And," a knowing gleam in his eye, "you've pretty much proven that you and your friends are going to keep doing stuff like this anyway, so we might as well at least keep an eye on you."

Dipper smirked, nodding, pulled out his consent form and signed his name.

* * *

_Six Hours Later_

The afternoon sun was high in the sky Dipper, Pacifica, Mabel, and their house guests finally trudged into his house and closed the door behind him. As soon as they left the San Francisco Field Office, Dipper and Mabel drove back to the rural Whitegrove Estate where the rest of their team, who wanted to present Power and Triggers proposal to the rest of the team. It had been…a hard sell, to say the least, mostly because of the nature of their bittersweet victory.

Jessica Ocampo was alive, but she would likely spend the next six months to a year learning to walk again.

Genevieve's brother, David, had not been found alive. Indeed, it seemed like David had already been…processed, and his remains buried in the mass grave at Briarwood. His heart ached for her. She'd come down here to save her brother, only to be too late. While she was satisfied that she'd gotten her revenge on her brother's murderers, he wouldn't have blamed and her friends for packing up and going back to Oregon. She'd certainly be returning there, at least long enough to lay her brother to rest when his remains were exhumed and identified.

Given all that, it was no surprise when Robbie had looked up at them and said, "We need to talk it over."

So they'd left them to their dining room deliberations and waited in the living room.

They were waiting for over an hour. They had a choice before them if they refused. Start over again with just the four of them, and slowly, rebuild their organization as they found the people. Or forget the whole enterprise.

The discussion was rendered moot when Robbie came out into the living room.

"Genevieve, Vivian, and their boyfriends," he began, "have agreed at least to give the proposal serious thought, but they want to delay a firm decision either way until David's remains have been found and properly buried. But they have promised to give us an answer when they're ready."

"That's understandable," Dipper said, sighing. "It's the decision I would have made in her place."

Robbie smiled though. "The rest of us, even Melanie, have agreed to sign on with you."

With that, he and the others packed up and gotten back into their cars for the drive back up to Oakland.

"Mom!" He called, as he and his friends moved through the house, Wendy, Robbie, and Tambry heading back to their rooms upstairs. "Dad!" He didn't really expect to find either of them. His father, an orthopedic surgeon, no doubt had his hands full, and his mom would have wasted no time wanting to start repairs to the restaurant. Alone, out of all the other Epicurean Club restaurants, it had not become a burned out shell when the angry rioters had surged through town after the announcement of what had gone down finally made the airwaves. Indeed, the high standing they and their friends had in public opinion polls seemed to be working for her, as money in the form of donations to help pay for the repairs had already started pouring in.

He opened the kitchen door, and smiled. Lying on the kitchen table, was a plate piled high with oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, he and Mabel's favorites.

"Hey, Mabel!" He called.

"What?" the equally exhausted Mabel moaned plaintively from the living room sofa where she'd plopped down as soon as she hit the door.

"Mom baked us cookies," Dipper called.

There was a loud thumping as Mabel hit the floor and seconds later tore past him, grabbing three or four cookies and starting to plow through them.

Dipper started forward, to get his share of the cookies before Mabel went through them like a buzz saw, when he saw it sticking out from under the plate.

A manila folder, wedged under the plate.

He pulled it out, opened it up. His eyes widened. Forgetting all about the cookies, he ran back into the living room. He read it again, his whole body trembling with anticipation as his eyes teared up.

"Pacifica!" Dipper shouted, running back into the room.

"Ehh," Pacifica grunted from the armchair she'd slumped into.

"My parents and my aunt have been busy," he said breathlessly as he walked over. "They've cleared the way for us to get married. Today."

"What?!" Pacifica said, all traces of exhaustion gone, as she abruptly sat up in her chair even. The sounds of chewing in the kitchen stopped and Mabel pulled up behind him.

"Take a look," he said, walking over and handing her the folder.

Inside it were three notarized letters, two from his parents and one from his aunt, stating that Dipper and Pacifica had their permission to get married. And there was also the written permission of his father's friend, California Superior Court Judge Warner Caslet.

And a note written in his mother's steady hand.

_Dear Dipper, Mabel, and Pacifica (because if you're not reading this together at the same time there's something wrong), the note began._

_The last forty-eight hours have been the most difficult of my life. The thought of what I was almost party to makes me sick, and I tell you without shame that I spent much of my night crying as the reports of what was going on at Briarwood came in._

_But you two, my two wonderful children, put a stop to it, and were willing to give up your own freedom to do so. I don't know how I managed to raise such children as you. But I'm proud of you, as I've always been._

_As for you, Pacifica, you've been a fixture in my son's life, and our own for four years now. You've been abused, tortured, and still came through to the other side. However, I've made no secret that I've questioned the wisdom of you and my son getting married even as soon as you two were planning. I thought that you should go to college first, and in my head, I couldn't help but think that one precluded the other._

_Until two nights ago. You risked your life and your sanity to keep Salvatore's thugs from killing us all from the rear. And I realized, truly realized, that you need each other, I saw all that you could accomplish together, and that this relationship will define you both. And that we should clear the way for you both._

_Now go get married you two._

_-Jennifer Pines_

He looked at Pacifica. She looked back at him, blue eyes glistening with unshed tears of joy.

"I'll go get the others," Mabel said from behind him, as she turned on her heels and darted upstairs.

* * *

_One hour later_

Pacifica tapped her foot nervously as they stood in the room set aside for the Deputy Marriage Commissioner at the Alameda County Clerk's office. He looked behind her to see all their friends behind them. Mabel, Wendy, Candy, Grenda, Melanie, Robbie, Tambry, Lee, and Nate. Even Genevieve and Vivian, were there. They were dressed in their usual clothing, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that they were there, favoring her with bittersweet smiles.

Pacifica walked over to them. "I'm sorry about your brother," Pacifica said simply.

"Don't be," Genevieve said softly, tears glinting in her eyes. "Thanks to you I can now bring him home to rest. I am however, sorry about how I treated you all those years ago. You and Dipper are, I'm ashamed to say, far better people than I am."

Pacifica smiled and pulled both her and Vivian into an embrace. "I forgive you. Both."

"Is everyone assembled?" A male voice said from behind her as a large, older, dark-skinned male strode in judge's robes strode into the room.

"Yes, sir," she heard Dipper say from behind her.

"Then let's get this show on the road," he said. Pacifica disentangled herself from her newfound old friends and walked back to her Dipper. She looked up into his warm brown eyes, the eyes she loved, the eyes in which she'd always seen her soul reflected back at her, and smiled.

"We are gathered here today, to join Dipper and Pacifica in in the bonds of matrimony. The essence of such a bond is one of Lover, Companion, and Friend. With this Union, you will stand aside each other in sickness and in health, and give each other the strength to grow both together and toward your own unique destinies."

"Do you, Aidan David 'Dipper' Pines, take this woman, Pacifica Elise Northwest as your lawfully wedded wife, to love, honor and keep her in times of sickness and health, through happiness and travail, until death do you part?"

Dipper smiled at her, and she could see his love for her written all over his face. "I do."

"Place the ring on her finger," the Deputy Marriage Commissioner said.

He removed her Claddagh ring from his pocket, and slid it onto the ring finger of her left hand.

"With this ring," Dipper said softly. "I thee wed, and so forever pledge my devotion."

"Do you, Pacifica Elise Northwest, take Aidan David 'Dipper' Pines as your lawfully wedded husband, to love, honor and keep him in times of sickness and health, through happiness and travail, until death do you part?"

"I do," she said fiercely.

"Place the ring on his finger."

Pacifica did as she was bade. "With this ring, I thee wed, and so forever pledge my devotion."

"Please join hands."

Dipper felt Pacifica take her left hand in his, and she clung to his hand fiercely.

"By the act of joining hands you take to yourself the relation of husband and wife and solemnly promise to love, honor, comfort, and cherish each other so long as you both shall live. Therefore by the power vested in me by the laws of the State of California, I hereby pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride."

Pacifica closed her eyes as Dipper pressed, a hard, bruising kiss to her lips. She smiled and leaned into the best kiss of her life.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the Commissioner said to their gathered guests, "I have the honor of introducing for the first time Mister and Misses Pines."

A/N: So this is it, the end of my first multichapter Gravity Falls fic. I know many of you were expecting an epic battle, but I found when writing it that it was something that could be skipped without damaging the overall plot. So I moved to the final chapter. However, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, This is  _not_ the end of their story, not even the beginning of the end. It is however, the end of the beginning.

Their adventures in this continuity will continue.


End file.
